
Class JSlM- 

Book. 3^*4- 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT; 



MESSAGES TO MOTHERS 



A PROTEST AGAINST 
ARTIFICIAL METHODS 

Presenting a Simple, 

Practical and Natural Scheme for 

the Right Diet, Care and Treatment of 

Mother and Child, and for the Conservation of 

Power in Physiological Functions, the 

Result of Twenty -three Years 

of Successful Practice 



BY 

HERMAN PARTSCH, M. D. 

AUTHOR OF 

THE ILLS OF 

INDIGESTION, THEIR CAUSES 

AND THEIR CURES 



PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY 

SAN FRANCISCO 
AND NEW YORK 



Copyright, 1908 
by Paul Elder and Company 



^ 






(UbtfARYofOQfoe,:B.S3.!j 
1'wo Copies riecw«o 

APR 21 1908 



Preface 



THIS work is the combined utilitarian re- 
sults of a series of vital human-nature 
studies, as pursued by a regular physi- 
cian in the course of twenty -three years 
of practice. The work is offered as a contribution 
to the common stock of hygienic learning. 

It is addressed primarily to mothers, because it 
concerns them chiefly, and because the writer there- 
fore regards them as the most impartial judges of 
the findings presented, and because through women 
lies the line of least resistance to these particular 
steps in the progress of hygienic learning. If my 
work passes woman's trial and judgment, it will 
receive the serious attention of the medical profes- 
sion all the sooner for having been first submitted 
to women. 

I do not encourage the domestic practice of 
medicine, and, with one harmless exception, have 
not mentioned a drug or a medicine. 

I recognize a subconscious intelligence, other- 
wise referred to as nature or instinct, the prompt- 
ings of which are called intuitions. 

iii 



Preface 



These intuitions I have sought to understand 
and have learned to trust unreservedly, and in all 
matters of food selection and rejection I do so trust 
them and am by the results fully justified in so 
doing. 

Accordingly, in the dietary details of the treat- 
ment of disease, I must differ radically from the 
prevailing practice of the medical profession gen- 
erally. 

The prevailing scheme of practice, for example, 
in the great group of digestive disorders, especially 
of young children, does not succeed, and I have no 
doubt about the propriety of assailing it, especially 
since I have an extremely simple, successful and 
perfectly natural scheme to offer in its stead. 

H. P. 

Berkeley, California. 



IV 



Contents 



Page 

Preface Hi 

Chapter 

I. Power in Physiological Functions . . Jt 

And in All Organization, Growth and Work 

II. Sickness of Pregnancy 2S 

Its Cause Revealed and Its Prevention Explained 

III. Natural Infant Feeding . ... 45 

The Reason Why It Fails and the Way It Will 
Succeed 

IV. The Maternity Nurse 61 

Spontaneous Intuition Compared with Artificial 
Training 

V. Ills of the Weaning Period . . .67 

Their Causes, Results, Prevention and Cure 

VI. Sweet Fruits Versus Confections . .116 

The Merits of the Natural and the Evils of the 
Artificial 

VII. Some Failures at School .... 138 

Why They Occur and How They May he 
Avoided 

V 



Chapter I 

Power in Physiological Functions 

And in All Organization, Growth 
and Work 

A LL PERSONS who are successfully en- 
/% gaged in affairs mechanical agree that 

/ — % perpetual motion is a fallacy, that 
JL Jk. nothing mechanical can be done with- 
out power to do it. But all sorts of authorities 
ignore the idea of power being involved in phys- 
iological functions. One whose word has weight 
has even declared to me that no power, or at any 
rate no appreciable amount of power, was in- 
volved in the organization, development and 
growth of a fetus. 

It will only be necessary to present a series of 
familiar and interesting facts, and the conclu- 
sion becomes apparent and evident that power 
is involved in all forms of organization, develop- 
ment and growth. This conclusion is almost the 
entire foundation of my book, and I must neces- 
sarily devote considerable space to the very in- 
teresting grounds upon which it is based. 

We cannot successfully employ at the same 
time, for distinctly different purposes, a com- 
bination of muscles and a combination of mental 



Messages to Mothers 



faculties. The superintendent in a factory stopped 
a foreman who was about to lend a hand at some 
heavy lifting. Said the superintendent to the 
foreman: "I don't want you to work, I want 
you to think; and I do n't want these men to 
think, I want them to work," alluding to the 
laborers. 

Much reading and knowing are very likely 
to involve the habit of thinking automatically 
and not to the purpose of the work in hand 
and thus spoil a person for a good occupation 
without qualifying him for any other. The illit- 
erate servant who knows his business is better 
and more efficient than the scholarly one who 
knows much else; this is apparent in the com- 
parison of Chinese and Japanese, whether as 
servants or otherwise. The best farmers I ever 
knew were illiterate men, but by no means ig- 
norant in regard to the essentials of their work 
and their business. The best business men are 
also comparatively illiterate, but they know and 
do business better than the men who know and 
think a good deal besides. 

Recently I was much interested in what proved 
to be better and cheaper than an experiment for 
my purpose. I observed the doings of two men, 
a gardener and his employer, on the grounds of 
the latter for one week, — the gardener working 
at somewhat skilled labor all the more atten- 



Power in Physiological Functions 

tively because the employer was constantly 
present, and the employer steadily talking all 
day and compelling the gardener to pay atten- 
tion and talk also. The gardener was a good, 
natural, unsophisticated character, not disposed 
to strike nor even to display any sign of the 
agony within him. The employer did not know 
that a gardener has not power enough to oper- 
ate his muscular instrumentalities and his mental 
instrumentalities at the same time for different 
and unrelated purposes. At the conclusion of 
the six days' service the gardener found himself 
thinner, weaker, irritable, dyspeptic, tired and 
almost prostrated. Now ordinarily a man is sup- 
posed to keep strong and well at gardening, and 
mere talking is not suspected of prostrating 
anybody, but it was the thinking in addition to 
the working that used up more power than his 
food supplied him and caused him to draw upon 
his power-storage battery of fat and burn that 
out to the extent of making his shrinkage as 
plainly apparent to others as his fatigue and dis- 
tress were to himself. 

The brain and muscles are instruments of 
labor. They are under ordinary circumstances 
not injured during periods of action more than 
what is easily restored during periods of rest. 
But an instrument can never do anything any- 
where on its own account, it must always require 

3 



Messages to Mothers 



power to operate it; it is the power that does the 
work. 

It requires much more power to operate the 
brain in the processes of voluntary and designed 
thinking than it does to operate any combina- 
tion of muscles at the hardest manual labor dur- 
ing the same length of time. From any com- 
parison of the maximum number of hours at 
mental labor and at manual labor, respectively, 
that men can endure per day and retain their 
normal weight with good digestion, sleep and 
good temper, it is deducible that an hour of 
purely original mental work costs even more 
power than two and one-half hours of hard man- 
ual labor. 

Ignorance of this fact has cost a great many 
thinkers a great deal of illness and it has even 
cost the lives of many at the very commence- 
ment of their careers. The only two essentials 
involved in labor of any kind are the instrument 
and the power. Of course there is a directing 
intelligence which also involves an instrumen- 
tality and also requires power. 

When a man works beyond the point of fatigue 
he becomes disabled, however slight his disability 
may be. This disability means that he has either 
exhausted his supply of power for the present, 
or that he has disabled his instrument. No doubt 
many cases of disabled brains occur and result 



Power in Physiological Functions 

from overtime mental work. Cases of this kind 
occur every year in any community where strenu- 
ous intellectual pursuits prevail; a few at least 
being reported, more must occur than the public 
becomes aware of. Often the obituary of a 
young man emphasizes his unusual ability, and 
it seems as if the strenuous efforts of the prodigy, 
encouraged by parents and teachers to improve 
on the natural gifts possessed, involved the use 
of mental faculties to an extent that ruined 
them, with illness and death as the final result. 
In the persistent effort to make more of what is 
already a youthful musical prodigy, he is de- 
prived of his natural and necessary childish play 
and associations, confined indoors, exhibited in 
the lime-light at untimely hours and worked 
excessively on matters that are hard and diffi- 
cult enough for mature mental instrumentalities. 
His career is brilliant but short; excessive and 
prolonged strain serves as cause of a break in the 
instrumentality, and the career ends, often in 
death. 

An editor told me of two brilliant young men, 
assistants to his position, who committed suicide. 
In addition to their prescribed work of six hours 
daily, six days a week, both these men did much 
extra work of the purely original mental kind 
with a view to improving their qualifications for 
advancement. I am told that editorial writers 



Messages to Mothers 



are allotted six hours a day, six days a week, for 
work, and that they break down at about forty 
years of age, the weaker ones sooner, while the 
stronger ones last longer. The aspiring young 
man in such a position who, in spite of feeling 
to the contrary, insists on spending some re- 
maining hours at hard mental work is, of course, 
in danger of being wrecked long before forty 
and, perhaps, fatally. There are lessons in these 
cases of illness, insanity, suicide and sometimes 
murder, but the utility of them is not much ap- 
propriated. 

Cases in which the disability, or illness, is due 
to exhaustion of power, in which the brain as an 
instrumentality remains inta6l, are numerous 
and conspicuous; the subjects of such cases live 
with sound minds to a good old age generally 
and, though quite miserable and almost con- 
stantly sick, they generally recover their health 
spontaneously during old age. The reason for 
their recovery is that they have retired from 
work and now, power being no longer excessively 
drawn upon for overtime work, they have enough 
power for digestion and bodily maintenance in 
general. These almost life-long invalids of body, 
but sound of mind, with their recovery of good 
health on retirement, prove that the brain as an 
instrument of labor in their cases was not dam- 
aged by the habitual overtime work which kept 

6 



Power in Physiological Functions 

them sick for years. That they recovered on re- 
tirement proves that their dyspepsia was due to 
their appropriation of so much power for their 
work that not enough was left for digestion. 

Dyspepsia was the salvation of such men as 
Schiller, Darwin, Carlyle, Herbert Spencer and 
many others. For, had not the sufferings of one 
day compelled them to rest the next and given 
nature a chance for at least a partial restoration, 
they would have ruined their instruments so 
early in life as not to have been heard of beyond 
the small circle in which the misfortune had oc- 
curred. Had they had the power to work sixteen 
hours a day, seven days a week, they would have 
tried to use their instruments of mental labor 
that long. It was power that failed them; they 
must have felt and, I suppose, to some vague 
extent must have understood this, but they did 
not understand that their digestion in particular 
and their physical maintenance in general failed 
because the power for these purposes was diverted 
to operate the brain. 

As early as 1859, and more plainly in 1874,* 
the late Professor Joseph Le Conte showed and 
explained that all the forces of Nature are cor- 
related and transmutable, that all the different 
forces of Nature are only different forms of the 
same energy. In accordance with these most 

*"The Conservation of Energy." — Stewart. 



Messages to Mothers 



useful fa6ts, first taught by Le Conte, we may as 
well admit — we can almost see in ourselves that 
we must admit — that all the different energies in 
the animal body are correlated and transmu- 
table. In our bodies, the heat, motion, elec- 
tricity, and digestive, growing, healing and 
mental energies, and the chemical energies of 
our foods and our fat, are all only different 
forms of the same force. 

As I am only considering energy or force as 
an agent which, through some instrumentality, 
accomplishes some work in the body, I use the 
same word that is employed in factories and 
shops. Force applied to work in a shop is called 
power. The fundamental proposition in this dis- 
cussion is, that it requires power to operate 
every function of every organ and of every cell 
in the body. We shall see that mental work, 
muscular work, digestive work and the work of 
physical maintenance of the body in good order, 
are all performed by the same power in different 
forms. 

Normally we all take in fuel enough to give 
us a large surplus of power beyond what is re- 
quired for bodily functions and maintenance. 
This surplus is available for what we call work. 
The body that is maintained in good order has 
also a power-storage battery, which is simply 
stored fuel in the form of fat, which will supply 

8 



Power in Physiological Functions 

power to maintain the bodily functions and 
even to do work when, on account of sickness, 
we cannot take food and when, owing to such 
misfortunes as are happening somewhere any 
time, we cannot get it. 

Our fat is our power-storage battery. When 
not otherwise useful it may at least be orna- 
mental. To the migratory bird, the hybernating 
bear, the ship-wrecked mariner, the besieged 
soldier and sick patient, the storage battery, 
when there is one, supplies the power to bridge 
the interval between meals. This interval may 
be, for the migrating bird long enough for him 
to fly two thousand miles, for a hybernating 
animal a whole winter season, for a patient the 
duration of his illness, for a ship-wrecked mar- 
iner or a besieged soldier, this interval between 
meals may be endured until either has, for the 
sake of power, burned up his timbers to an ex- 
tent, according to " Yeo's Physiology," as follows: 



Fat. 


- 


97 per cent 


Muscle 


- 


- 30 " " 


Liver 


_ 


56 " " 


Spleen 


_ 


- 63 " " 


Blood - 


- 


17 " " 



In such cases the nervous structures not only 
remain inta6l but in good order, and all the ma- 
terials appropriated for the emergency are so 
completely restored, on the return to normal 

9 



Messages to Mothers 



conditions, that in the end one is none the worse 
for having been so situated. 

Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey of Meadville, 
Pennsylvania, resorts to fasting as a means of 
curing his patients. He reports enough cases to 
demonstrate that fasting is a safe therapeutic 
means when administered knowingly. He re- 
ports Miss Kuenzel of Philadelphia as having 
fasted forty-five days at a loss of twenty pounds 
and with complete restoration from a serious 
illness in which her mind was involved and on 
which account she was taken to an asylum 
where she did not improve. This was in 1899. 
Miss Kuenzel was a refined woman, twenty-two 
years of age and weighed one hundred and forty 
pounds at the start and one hundred and twenty 
pounds at the conclusion of her forty-five days' 
easy fast without any trouble to herself or any 
one else. She took no drugs and there was noth- 
ing but nature to which credit was due for 
recovery. Credit was also due Dr. Dewey and 
the friends for trusting this " nature of the ani- 
mal " to perform this restoration. 

Nothing is done without power, and in this 
case the power which it cost to restore order in 
the body of this patient and to keep all her 
bodily functions, excepting those of the digestive 
apparatus, in a6lion, was represented by the 
twenty pounds of fat which disappeared. The 

10 



Power in Physiological Functions 

average daily quantity of power required was 
represented by four-ninths, or less than half a 
pound of fat. The patient was up and around, 
went to entertainments and took long walks, a 
seven-mile tramp on the thirty-seventh day. 

The amount of power that some men and 
women require to do mental work per day is 
represented by the amount of fat per day which 
they gain in weight when they stop work, other- 
wise making no change. This daily gain, for a 
week or two, is in many cases a pound. This 
matter is, of course, generally observed only in 
cases of persons who have been reduced in weight 
by overtime work. The power which a hog in 
the pen gets from its food is stored in the form 
of fat, because there is nothing for the hog to do 
by which it could pay out the power. In 1866 I 
saw the grass getting scarcer, thinner and shorter 
as we moved at the rate of a hundred miles a 
week westward from Omaha, while our oxen, 
drawing heavy loads, were also as gradually get- 
ting thinner. The grass was their only food and 
must have been far from being sufficient to sup- 
ply the power that drew the loads. The fat of 
the oxen was used up to furnish the power. 

Power is required for self-control, for self-gov- 
ernment. "He that ruleth himself is mightier 
than he that taketh a city." Not much power 
is required for this purpose; self-control does 

11 



Messages to Mothers 



not make one tired, does not exhaust one's 
power, but it requires always the presence of a 
high measure of power; high pressure, the steam 
engineer would call it, or high voltage, the elec- 
trician would say. Successful self-governors are 
strong men and women. Children are, and some 
invalids ought to be, governed by parents or 
guardians. It does not seem to require much 
power to make up one's mind, or to come to a 
decision or conclusion; but this seems easy only 
to the strong, while the same action seems about 
impossible to those who are powerless. To be 
short of physical power means to be short of 
mental power. For much that children and 
other subordinates do, they are spared the trouble 
and do not require the power to make up their 
minds; their parents and superiors do that for 
them and only the action is left to be fulfilled. 
To this extent one may be controlled by the 
mind of another. That a thing is easy to do, if 
you only make up your mind, is true; but it is 
harder to make up one's mind to do a thing, if 
he is weak and powerless, than it is to do the 
thing. 

An hysterical woman is simply one who is 
powerless, owing to digestive disorder or over- 
time work, and her self-control is not easy for 
the further reason that it is not habitual. She 
cries or laughs automatically when there is provo- 

12 



Power in Physiological Functions 

cation to that effect. It requires little or no 
power to laugh or cry, but it requires power not 
to laugh and especially not to cry, and it requires 
still more power to make up her mind not to cry 
or to stop crying. Of course, she stops crying in 
time, because crying occurs in self-limited periods. 

It sometimes happens that nothing can be 
done for a patient because there is no guardian- 
ship. There are insubmissive and lone men and 
women, sixty years of age, more or less, with af- 
fairs to which they have given their attention 
and their power to the last unit of their storage 
batteries. Now they are weak and sick and have 
not power to make up their minds to resign af- 
fairs wholly or partly to others. Bodily functions 
fail for want of power; they call for help, but 
when help arrives they occupy the whole time 
with their own automatic talk; they never listen, 
never understand, never succeed in grasping the 
proffered helping idea. A child would not, 
either. They need a guardian. One such person 
was given the ominous suggestion to wind up 
his business. He did so, expecting Death as the 
next comer. But power being released from busi- 
ness, it became available for bodily functions; 
restoration took place and he made a complete 
spontaneous recovery. 

Talking and compulsory listening cost much 
power; either one alone can exhaust the power 

13 



Messages to Mothers 



of a person to the point of prostration. That 
such prostration is called " nervous prostration " 
or "nervous exhaustion" shows the state of the 
prevailing misunderstanding of this matter. 
People seem to think the nerves are out of 
order. " It 's your nerves," repeats the doctor to 
the patient, and no wonder he fails to do any 
good for her. Power has not been taken into 
reckoning. If the electrician did not take power 
into reckoning, he might also repeat, when your 
electrical apparatus failed to work, "It's the 
wires." The nerves are all right; I doubt that 
they are ever out of working order; I am sure 
the blame is misplaced. The nervous system 
seems to be self-repairing and self-maintaining, 
and is not even impaired by the extreme ex- 
haustion of starvation. The subconscious mind 
cares for the nervous system and preserves it 
from all harm except that of poisons. Wires 
may get out of order, but the nerves, I believe, 
never; it is the power which operates the nerves 
that fails. 

What mind is, we do not know; we know to 
some extent what it does. We know it operates 
through instrumentalities, and that the cells, or 
groups of cells, of the well-known gray nervous 
matter, mostly within the skull but much of it 
elsewhere in the body, are the instrumentalities. 
There are circumstances enough which tend to 

14 



Power in Physiological Functions 

prove that mind is helpless without power to 
operate its instrumentalities. Whatever the 
human brain may achieve, it is the fuel foods, 
chiefly the starches, sugars and fats, that supply 
the power to accomplish the achievement. The 
same power might otherwise operate a pick and 
shovel, or the same fuel might be burned in a 
furnace and yield power to run a machine, or a 
dynamo and produce electricity. Mind should 
be reckoned as including all that intelligence 
within us that governs all the activities of every 
organ, including the brain, and of every cell. 
We are conscious of some mind and unconscious 
of what I believe to be the greater part of it. 

We have then conscious mind and we have 
subconscious mind, which we often refer to as 
nature, "nature of the animal," with the small 
initial letter to distinguish it from the Universal 
Intelligence, spoken of and written as Nature 
with the capital initial. Mind attends to volun- 
tary actions of the body; the subconscious mind 
attends to the involuntary functions and to all 
organs and cells of the body, governing and 
maintaining each organ and its function and 
keeping them all in coordinate action. Even a 
faint idea of what is going on in the body, and 
the coordinate character of it all, must give us a 
very exalted notion of the subconscious part of 
our minds. 

15 



Messages to Mothers 



The subconscious mind does much more than 
conduct the mere animal functions; it contrib- 
utes very largely to the mental work of solving 
problems, developing inventions, organizing and 
formulating arguments, essays, books, musical 
compositions and so on. The subconscious mind 
originates ideas and delivers them to mind like 
prepaid parcels, as O. W. Holmes said. The or- 
ganization and growth of mental untertakings, 
like the production of a book, go on much un- 
consciously, and, though under direction of mind, 
they are the work of subconscious mind rather 
more than of the conscious. 

It can be shown that the work of the subcon- 
scious mind is done at the expense of power. 
Many of the best writers have been ill with di- 
gestive disorders coincidently with the progress 
of organization and growth of a piece of work. 
While the time they spent voluntarily working 
at their tasks may not have been excessive, their 
attention was on their work at all other hours of 
the day and night. Ideas merged into conscious- 
ness at off times, even during sleep, causing them 
to awaken, showing that organization and growth 
of the work were going on at such times and at 
all times until the work was complete and ready 
for delivery through pen on paper. At all times, 
then, so long as one or more subjects were the 
objects of paramount attention, was the subcon- 

16 



Power in Physiological Functions 

scious mind busy and using power for the or- 
ganization and growth of the new intellectual 
structures, and the more complicated the organi- 
zation and greater the structure, the more power 
it required. 

So much power, indeed, has many a work cost 
its author, that in sacrificing what was necessary 
for digestion, protracted illness has been the 
result because not enough power was reserved 
for the maintenance of that physical integrity 
called health. We may say truly and in all sin- 
cerity that Thomas Carlyle, for example, suffered 
from the sickness of pregnancy. He never wrote 
but one book without being miserably sick before 
it was organized and completely developed and 
ready for commitment to paper. This sickness, 
we will take more pains to show, was due to 
failure of the digestive functions, because power, 
that was present and available for digestion, 
was diverted to the work of organization of the 
book. The principles are just the same when, 
as in the case of pregnancy as ordinarily under- 
stood, it is the organization and growth of a 
fetus, with only this difference, — that in the case 
of a book the whole affair is largely subject to 
control by the conscious mind, whereas in fetal 
pregnancy the conscious mind has nothing to do 
with the case, as we shall see later. 

It may be required to know what are the 

17 



Messages to Mothers 



means of avoiding this sickness of mental preg- 
nancy? I should say, and base my saying on 
theory confirmed by experience: limit your vol- 
untary work at your undertaking to a short 
sitting in the forenoon and afternoon, or to fore- 
noon or afternoon only; sit only so long as you 
can do good work, and no longer; rest absolutely 
from such work at least one day in seven; do 
not work on the subjects nor on any other mental 
work during the evening. If you are irritable, 
sleepless and dyspeptic under this plan which 
allows the subconscious mind to continue work 
between sittings and at all other times of day 
and night and Sundays, then divert your atten- 
tion sometime daily to some other occupation or 
pastime which does not require more than the 
simplest mental effort and only the least power. 
This will interrupt the work of the subconscious 
mind, stop its appropriation of power and allow 
you enough power for bodily functions and nor- 
mal maintenance. Rest from voluntary mental 
work at least one hour after each meal so that 
your digestive apparatus may have the benefit 
of all your might for digestion. Do not watch 
the clock for the expiration of this hour of rest 
after each meal, rather watch your feelings for 
the moment when power becomes available for 
operating the brain. 

Since it is true that each one can do his own 



18 



Power in Physiological Functions 

work best in his own way, let these instructions 
be disregarded and work as you please so far as 
your health will permit. If you need these in- 
structions, but think their adoption involves a 
waste of much time and a long delay of the end 
of your work, remember that those who were 
sick a great deal, as Darwin, Carlyle and Herbert 
Spencer were, lost a great deal of time owing to 
illness, and, even when well enough to work, 
could only sit a short while. Spencer worked 
one to two hours daily; Darwin, three to three 
and a quarter hours daily; Carlyle tried to work 
all day and half the night, seven days a week, 
but, of course, was on many days too ill to work 
at all. These statements are not true for the en- 
tire working careers of Darwin and Spencer. 
Before settling down to these limits they worked 
overtime and became ill and their ills forced 
them to the limits mentioned. It must be re- 
membered, for it is one of my premises, that a 
unit of mental energy is worth at least two and 
a half units of muscular energy; in other words, 
an hour of original mental work costs as much 
power as two and a half hours of hard manual 
labor. 

The sickness of fetal pregnancy, though often 
very distressing and sometimes unnecessarily 
fatal, is a simple matter and can now be ex- 
plained in a simple way, which in turn leads to 

19 



Messages to Mothers 



natural, simple and easy means of prevention 
and cure without drugs. Power, the part it per- 
forms in the case, is the principal thing to be 
considered and understood in the premises. 
Every constructive process of matter and mind 
requires power. In Nature there are two kinds 
of constructive processes: one is growth simply, 
the other is organization, and the two are always 
carried on in the same structure but not always 
at the same time. Power is indispensable to the 
organization and growth of every plant and 
every animal and every detail of the same. 
Power is required for the healing or restoration 
of any part destroyed or injured. 

Organization requires more power than mere 
growth. The hardest and most fatiguing part of 
constructing a book, a plan, or any mental com- 
position, is its organization. The bird does not 
grow in the egg, it is only organized there. The 
fat of the egg is the stored power which is em- 
ployed in the organization. This fat is in the 
yolk and, in the case of the hen's egg, is equal 
to half the weight of the egg minus the shell 
and water. Leaving water out of the reckoning, 
the fuel material is by weight equal to the ma- 
terial used in the structure. 

The caterpillar accumulates and stores ma- 
terial very similar to the yolk of the hen's egg, 
says Professor Woodworth, entomologist. This 

20 



Power in Physiological Functions 

material supplies the power which effects its 
change of organization, or reorganization, to that 
of the butterfly. This is a great change, and the 
relatively great loss of weight by the time the 
process is complete indicates what a large share 
of the caterpillar's own material has disap- 
peared, — burned up to furnish power for the re- 
organization. " The weight of the emerging but- 
terfly is in many cases not one-tenth that of the 
caterpillar," said Professor Joseph Le Conte. In 
the case of the hen's egg there must be a similar 
loss of weight. A promised determination of the 
amount of this loss has up to the last moment 
failed to reach me. I suggest, at any rate, that 
the weight of the newly hatched chick will be 
found to be a surprisingly small fraction of the 
weight of the fresh-laid egg, the loss represent- 
ing the fuel that supplied the power that effected 
the organization of the bird. The same must be 
true for every egg in which organization takes 
place outside the parent body. 

It happens regularly with many plants and 
animals that an extraordinary amount of power 
is needed at times and under circumstances 
when none at all is obtainable, or when its re- 
quirement can only be supplied in part. Under 
these circumstances the power is stored in the 
tissues in the form of fuel material ready for the 
emergency when that arrives. Thus plants store 

21 



Messages to Mothers 



fuel as well as building material for use during 
the organization and growth of flowers, fruits 
and seeds. While most plants can accumulate 
these materials fast enough to produce fruit or 
seed annually, others require more than one 
year. The century plant is said to require from 
ten to seventy years, according to soil and climate, 
to accumulate the large quantity of starch in its 
great thick leaves with which to produce its 
great flower stalk and its enormous crop of 
flowers, and then seeds, for which purpose it 
finally gives up all its power, even that vital 
power called life — 

" For it blooms but once and, blooming, it dies." 

Migratory birds during a season of feeding 
store fat to supply the power that is to carry 
them on their flight of possibly two thousand 
miles, during which they are to have neither 
food nor rest. 



22 



Chapter II 

Sickness of Pregnancy 

Its Cause Revealed and Its 
Prevention Explained 



IN THE case of fetal organization, develop- 
ment and growth, the question of power is 
paramount. Her food is the woman's source 
of power and material for organization, 
growth and maintenance, and the food is also 
the source of power used for any work or play 
of body or mind. Generally a woman in a good 
state of health will be about as busy as she is able 
to be, whether with work or play of muscle or 
brain, or both. Even if time is given to company, 
it keeps her brain busy, and mental effort uses 
up power much faster and more of it than hard 
labor in the same length of time. She eats what 
and all she feels she needs, and pays out power in 
various ways all she feels she can, and that is all 
corredl. In regard to the various objects of her 
attention — the house, the children, the husband, 
the relations, the dressmaker, the callers she 
must receive, the calls she must make, the church 
and its various auxiliaries, the reading she must 
do — they are of such character that she is not 
likely to leave them unattended to, nor to rele- 

23 



Messages to Mothers 



gate them to some one else, until something 
happens to change the current of domestic 
events. Her routine of duties is established and 
is not easily alterable. Her routine of dietary 
subsistence is also established and is not easily 
changed. She is a woman of " regular " habits, 
perhaps, and while she has all due respect for 
the law of change, she may not be aware to what 
little things that law applies. So far, however, 
she is perfectly well, which proves that her ways 
are correct so far, and so they are. 

Let us suppose that the lady's efforts have 
been using up her power to the last unit, that 
now the stage of pregnancy begins and there 
arises at once the additional demand for power 
as well as material for the organization, develop- 
ment and growth of the fetus. The perpetuation 
of its kind is above all things the paramount 
concern of the animal. It is not strange then 
that we find the fetus to be the paramount con- 
cern of the subconscious mind, nature. 

This nature ( of the animal ) is complex, just 
as the conscious mind is; it has faculties just as 
the conscious mind has. Thus there is evidence 
of the presence of what I have called the gastric 
intelligence, a detail of nature that we have op- 
portunities of knowing better than any other 
subconscious faculty. We cannot know what 
this nature is, but we can to some very impor- 

24 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



tant extent know what it does. I have already 
alluded to this intelligence as performing what 
is called unconscious cerebration; we must give 
the same nature credit for attending so perfectly 
well to all the functions of every organ and cell 
in the body — when not interfered with by con- 
scious mind. Nature governs them all and main- 
tains them all in coordinate action. We, the 
mind, need know nothing about what is in us, 
nor what is going on in us. Mind, with its al- 
ways incomplete and doubtful knowledge of body 
and mind, cannot even take any initiative toward 
assisting nature without great liability to do 
harm. Mind has no business in nature's jurisdic- 
tion. This nature is a very highly developed in- 
telligence and an infant inherits it in this al- 
ready perfected state. 

This nature is not amenable to improvement 
by education of mind. This nature under natural 
conditions does not mislead; it is practically in- 
errant, as Naturalist John Burroughs said. Mind, 
under the influence of learning, does mislead; 
especially misleading is all that learning per- 
taining to the needs of the body in health and 
disease when appropriated by those who are 
well. That learning is not yet elevated to the 
dignity of science and is not yet generally fit 
for appropriation in the sick-room. In cases 
of functional disease the greatest results of 

25 



Messages to Mothers 



benefit to the patient come from doing nothing. 
This is from observation and experience. This 
is what the " Christian Science " method of heal- 
ing amounts to and is the method that amounts 
to a virtual resignation of oneself into the care 
of his own great subconscious intelligence, the 
capacity of which for healing and restoring or- 
der out of disorder has not yet begun to be un- 
derstood. It does not need to be understood by 
animals in a state of nature, nor by children that 
are let alone in their selections with only foods 
in reach that are natural and simple — not un- 
duly mixed nor artificially modified. But those 
who are immersed in the pursuit of understand- 
ings cannot afford to leave an understanding of 
their own natures, so far as that is possible, out 
of consideration. One may at least know his 
own nature well enough to trust it. 

Nature often expresses itself; it makes selec- 
tions and demands which the untutored mind, 
with nothing artificial in reach, would make no 
mistake in interpreting. Nature can be trusted 
to make no mistake in the selection of foods. A 
child, even a baby, will make no mistake in selec- 
tion, but the tutored conscious intelligence, that 
assumes to do selection for it, will and does make 
serious mistakes and repeats them a thousand 
times over. Here was a case in which mind and 
nature in the same person were at variance one 

26 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



evening on a question of selection; twenty-four 
hours later they disagreed again on the same 
point, but had in the meantime changed sides in 
relation thereto. There was here a longing for 
corned beef and cabbage so dominant as to com- 
pel a chronic dyspeptic to call for and eat it. On 
the other hand, his conscious mind strongly but 
vainly remonstrated, and he fully believed he 
was doing wrong and that he would surely suffer 
for eating the combination, and so he ate it with 
fear of the results. Then he was surprised and 
delighted to find that he did not suffer at all; 
not even the expectation of suffering had been 
competent to bring it on. Having found that he 
could digest corned beef and cabbage and re- 
gretting that he ate it with fear when he might 
just as well have enjoyed it, the man decided to 
go to the same place twenty-four hours later and 
have corned beef and cabbage again and enjoy it. 
First it was the subconscious mind that made the 
selection, the conscious mind dissenting; twenty- 
four hours later it was the conscious mind that 
made the choice, the subconscious was not yet 
heard from. The combination was again called 
for, consumed, enjoyed without fear, rather with 
the pleasing consciousness of the demonstrated 
fa6l that it agreed with his stomach. " It agreed " 
is not correct; corned beef and cabbage, cooked, 
must be dead and cannot be supposed to have 

27 



Messages to Mothers 



living intelligence to agree or disagree; but the 
stomach has the intelligence and can agree or 
disagree on the choice made by the conscious 
mind. The gastric intelligence did not agree on 
the choice of corned beef and cabbage a second 
time in twenty-four hours. The stomach struck, 
did nothing with the mess, so it was left to decay 
in the stomach and serve as the cause of such a 
bad night that the man when met five years 
later had not again eaten corned beef and cab- 
bage. There are plenty of other and similar ex- 
amples, and the reader is very likely to know of 
several of the kind. 

Illiterate people, not having the advantages 
of learning, have also not its disadvantages; 
they are not misguided by it; being governed 
more by inerrant nature, they have better luck 
in matters of health of themselves and children. 
I speak of misappropriation of learning and of 
being misguided by learning; I mean that when 
one is well he should not allow himself to make 
any change in the care of himself, or in his diet, 
as a result of what he reads, or what " they say." 
He should not be influenced into making any 
change in his selection by any alleged ease or 
difficulty of digestion, nor by the relative nu- 
tritive values of food materials, nor by the 
alleged fitness of special foods for special pur- 
poses. Mothers who happen to have sick chil- 

28 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



dren have been alluded to as ignorant in regard 
to matters of health, diet and disease. Ignorant 
is not the proper word; even if the mother is 
absolutely illiterate, she has her subconscious 
mind and a natural wisdom sufficient unto all 
that she is constituted and therefore designed to 
perform. She succeeds in raising children and 
must certainly be given credit for knowing how. 
It is only of the artificial and conventional sym- 
bols and formulas by which natural knowledge 
is expressed and communicated that she is ig- 
norant. 

The welfare of the fetus is of the same kind 
of paramount importance as the life of the race; 
accordingly we find the subconscious mind un- 
compromising in its attention to it. The mind 
now has no chance to contest any point in regard 
to the fetus. I write with reference always to 
that standard of woman who holds firmly to 
what her subconscious mind indicates as right. 
The fetus is the subconscious mind's prime ob- 
ject of solicitude now. From the moment that 
life is kindled in the ovule the subconscious 
mind will see to it that material and power are 
supplied for its organization and growth even if 
material and power fail for other purposes of 
body and mind. The demands of the subcon- 
scious mind for the fetus are to be constant day 
and night for nine months, and during the first 

29 



Messages to Mothers 



three months, more or less, the demand for power 
is extraordinary, because during the first three 
months organization takes place. 

Sickness of pregnancy affecls mostly the 
women who employ their minds, and its severity 
is proportional to the amount of power paid out 
in the form of mental effort. The educated, the 
thinking, the reading, the talking women, are 
the ones most likely to surfer. This includes also 
the woman whose work, like housework and care 
of children, is a matter of too much anxiety and 
thought to her. It includes also the little woman 
who manages a big house and is doing a big 
woman's work. She is a little instrument apply- 
ing herself to a big undertaking. The speedy 
woman is pretty sure to come in for a share of 
this sickness because she is speedy and pays out 
power unduly fast and soon exhausts her supply. 
That is why she is thin; she keeps her storage 
battery of fat burned low, or so promptly pays 
out all power derived from her food that none 
of it can be stored as fat. Power varies as the 
square of the speed; if the speed be doubled, 
the cost of power will be fourfold; if the speed 
be increased threefold, the cost of power will 
then be ninefold in any given time. 

Sickness of pregnancy, then, is one of the evils 
that have come with, or have been augmented 
by, learning, which has possessed women with 

30 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



more to think of and more to care for, demand- 
ing of them to pay out so much power that in 
many cases their bodies are ill-maintained and 
their health is defective in comparison with 
those who use their brains less and reserve their 
power rather for their personal maintenance and 
duties of a more natural and domestic character. 
The lady finding herself pregnant will gen- 
erally make no reduction of her efforts, of her 
expenditure of power. She will carry on her 
usual duties, and her subconscious mind will 
give the fetus all the power it needs, and it needs 
a great deal day and night for the first three 
months. The quantity of food not having been 
increased, the supply of power remaining as be- 
fore, there is not enough to keep up the usual 
work and supply the fetus also. The fetus is 
first served, whatever happens, and the mind, 
erroneously and contrary to feeling expressed 
by subconscious mind, continues to direct that 
all the work of muscle and brain continue as 
usual. But there is not power enough for all 
this, so the shortage must fall somewhere, — some 
function must fail. Two things happen now 
simultaneously: functions of brain and stomach 
fail and disorder and suffering begin. The mind 
of the patient does not understand this matter; 
her subconscious mind does understand it, as 
will appear from what she will now be com- 

31 



Messages to Mothers 



pelled to do by way of emergency treatment en- 
tirely regardless of any conscious wishes or wis- 
dom. 

The subconscious mind applies a partial rem- 
edy for the brain's deficiency of fuel by increas- 
ing at intervals the pressure of blood in the 
brain. Nausea is the sensation one feels when 
the brain is in a short time afFec~led by poverty 
or deficiency of blood. If one lies down without 
a pillow, blood pressure in the brain is increased 
and the patient feels less nausea, or none at all, 
showing that the recumbent position without a 
pillow is a proper detail of treatment. If the 
patient does not lie down, or if lying down does 
not relieve the nausea, the subconscious mind 
will compel the patient to perform and repeat 
the act of retching in spite of the mind of the 
patient or of her physician. This is the subcon- 
scious mind's way of increasing blood pressure in 
the brain and making conditions as favorable as 
possible for the brain to get a better supply of 
fuel material. In retching, the contents of the 
chest and abdominal cavities are so squeezed as to 
force upward some of the blood contained in 
their vessels. This is not vomiting, and is just as 
likely to take place when the stomach is empty. 
When there is material in the stomach and it 
happens to be squeezed up this will not be essen- 
tial but only incidental to the process, because 

32 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



there is nothing to prevent it. The stomach has 
nothing to do with retching except to be passively 
implicated in a purely incidental way. 

Sometimes the failure of the brain, owing to 
shortage of fuel, is rather sudden and we see to 
some extent just what it fails in. We see that 
it fails to maintain consciousness, as a result of 
which all that depends upon consciousness fails 
also. The subconscious mind warns the patient 
to lie down, but it is so much the fashion to try 
to weather through an unpleasantness and not 
give in and be the subject of a sensation. The 
premonitory feeling is disregarded, or the cir- 
cumstances may not permit lying down; the pa- 
tient falls unconscious. The recumbent position 
into which the subconscious mind puts the pa- 
tient is the temporary emergency treatment, and 
soon consciousness is regained, because in this 
position gravity increases blood pressure in the 
brain as compared with the upright position in 
which gravity diminishes it. This scene is of 
common occurrence in church at early morning 
services to which it is customary to go before 
eating. 

Poverty of blood in respect of nutritive ma- 
terial, especially fuel or power material, is in 
these cases the cause of nausea. The subcon- 
scious mind's plan of retching is temporary and 
merely for the emergency; something worse 

33 



Messages to Mothers 



might happen if the subconscious did not so 
increase blood pressure in the brain. The real 
remedy consists in supplying nutritive material, 
eating. Eating may seem out of the question; 
the thought of food may be repugnant; the 
sense of hunger is present but is obscured by the 
ugly sensations of the illness; the patient, how- 
ever, will soon feel the better for eating and will 
thus be convinced that eating is the proper thing 
under the circumstances. What shall the patient 
eat ? That cannot be prescribed, because no one 
can seledl for her, not even her own mind can 
selec~l. Diet learning, such as it is, is ridiculously 
out of place in the sick-room; it not only fails 
in the sick-room and in the hospital, but it kills 
many a patient — this selection of one mind for 
the stomach of another — in proof of which there 
is much evidence that is only now beginning to 
receive attention, and more, I think, from the 
popular mind than from the medical profession. 
The subconscious mind of the patient must make 
the selection always. Let the patient disregard 
all learning on matters of diet, on the relative 
nutritive values and the relative ease or difficulty 
of digestion of things, and give attention to 
feeling, which is the language of her subcon- 
scious mind. The only care then remaining is to 
make no mistake in the interpretation of the 
feelings. The subconscious mind knows nothing 

34 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



that is unnatural; it neither knows nor calls for 
artificial conglomerations. If, for example, one 
longs for something sweet, let her look at dates, 
raisins, figs or any other sweet fruit, fresh or in 
a good natural state of preservation, and take 
what she feels she wants. To conclude that the 
subconscious mind calls for candy is to misinter- 
pret the call, yet the simpler candies are likely 
to serve one's purpose very well, such as nut 
candy and molasses candy; these are very nearly 
natural. Of the sweet fruits, the best for any 
person are those which that person likes best and 
can most frequently eat. There are two varieties 
of dates in the market, the golden date and the 
Fard date. Dates are found to be in the most 
constant demand by the greatest number of 
persons for the greatest length of time, and 
are, therefore, the best sweet fruit available. 
Sweet fruits are natural objects of natural de- 
mands; candy is not the object, it is artificial, 
the primitive woman did not have candy. On 
the selection of foods during this illness more 
will be said later. 

We will next consider the cessation of work 
by the stomach because power has failed. Action 
of the stomach simply stops; not even the gastric 
juice is supplied, for it requires power to supply 
that also. The gastric juice is among other 
things the sterilizing agent; when it is not sup- 

35 



Messages to Mothers 



plied the food must undergo decomposition and, 
if it does undergo such change, a whole string of 
distressing evils will follow, such as only a 
chronic dyspeptic knows of. Here the subcon- 
scious mind comes to the rescue again; it causes 
the entire mess to be sent up as a lesser evil 
than what must otherwise follow. This is vom- 
iting and is done by design, but it is the subcon- 
scious mind's business, and in such emergencies 
this has its way. When it appears that the proc- 
ess of sending material up from the stomach is 
difficult, when repeated attempts are made with 
much distress and poor success, it is likely that 
the content of the stomach is too nearly solid, 
not liquid enough to float up easily. One, two 
or three cups of very warm water should then 
be taken, which is promptly used by the stomach 
as a carrier. The stomach never sends up water 
except as a means of floating up other material. 
The stomach having been emptied and the food 
having failed to serve as a source of material 
and power, the subconscious mind has recourse 
to the woman's fat for power and her other 
structures for material with which to build the 
fetus. The fetus does not in any known respe6l 
suffer in this affair, but, of course, there is a 
limit beyond which this rejection of food cannot 
go without danger to the life of the woman and 
of the fetus also. 



36 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



In the prevailing professional practice there is 
danger, some deaths do occur, but only as a result 
of the practice. The cause and nature of the 
illness not being understood, the treatment is 
rather more likely to do harm than good; I 
have not known it to do any good. A successful 
and absolutely safe method of treatment, briefly 
stated, would consist of doing absolutely noth- 
ing for the patient. Being left to the guidance 
of her own feelings, her own subconscious mind, 
she would do about the right things and get 
along well. Let the patient alone, relieve her of 
duties, of company, of advisers; attend to her 
wants as she feels them. From that moment her 
condition improves and in a day or two she is 
pretty well and will get on satisfactorily if only 
she is not, by what she reads or what "they 
say," induced to return to the erroneous ways 
the moment she is again comfortable. 

So much, so persistently and so fast is power 
appropriated for the organization and growth of 
the fetus, that the fuel material of the last meal 
is exhausted before the next meal is taken, which 
is most likely to happen during the longest in- 
terval between meals, as between the evening 
and next morning. The patient no sooner gets 
out of bed on to her feet than she is sick; she 
may even feel sick before she gets up; it is com- 
mon to be awakened by the sensation of nausea 

37 



Messages to Mothers 



as early as two o'clock in the morning. Eating 
is the remedy for the emergency; but it is bet- 
ter to prevent these emergencies. To do so means 
eating at bedtime and eating before rising in the 
morning, having breakfast in bed. There should 
be as little delay as possible in getting some- 
thing to eat when nausea is present or felt to be 
coming. Nausea in these cases when the stomach 
is empty is to be interpreted as an urgent sense 
of hunger. After breakfast in bed let the patient 
remain in bed in undisturbed peace thirty to 
sixty minutes; let the feelings be watched in- 
stead of the clock; let the patient get up when 
she feels like doing so. 

As a matter of precaution let there be within 
reach, so as to be got without raising the head, 
a few edibles that can be resorted to in case sick- 
ness is felt very early in the morning. What 
these edibles are to be, is to be determined by 
each patient for herself. She should not a6l on, 
even if she listens to, what others say. She 
should not even waste power listening; what 
was good for them may not be good for her. 
Other minds with their learning cannot influ- 
ence or govern her bodily functions; she has her 
own subconscious mind which will mind its own 
business all the better when let alone. The 
bodily functions are exclusively under the juris- 
diction of the subconscious mind which expresses 

38 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



its needs by feelings that merge into conscious- 
ness. Let the patient consider these exclusively 
in making her food selections. A combination 
of illness, anxiety and hunger puts the patient 
in a condition to appreciate the help of so much 
as a suggestive list exhibiting many materials 
from which she is to select the few she wants. 
Such list, in the fashion of a bill of fare, will 
help much, and it should be made without worry- 
ing the patient so much as to consult her about 
its making; but when made she must read it, 
or have it read to her, for the purpose of select- 
ing what is likely to be wanted within reach 
during the night or early morning or between 
meals. 

This list should include everything that can 
be made available, ready to eat and that is good. 
A foodstuff is proven to be good by the fact 
that it has been and is much and often used by 
many. While this suggested list is to be made 
by or for each patient according to circumstances 
of availability and season, I suggest that among 
other things it contain so far as practicable the 
following: — 

Almonds, English walnuts, Brazil nuts and filberts (un- 
bleached nuts are in the better state of preservation ) . 
Raisins, the best clusters. 
Dates, both varieties. 
Figs, best dried, when fresh figs are unavailable. 



39 



Messages to Mothers 



Pop-corn, prepared at home, unmixed with other matters. 
Olives, pickled ; some ripe, some green. 
Onions, some fresh, some pickled. 
Beef, dried; cooked or not cooked. 
Fish, dried; cooked or not cooked. 
Crackers, plainest fresh, in variety. 
Biscuits, cold ; no objection to hot. 

Rice, plain boiled, cold or hot. ( Mixed with a little pure 
olive-oil and a shake of salt, even cold rice is very fine.) 
Fruits, fresh, raw or stewed (without sugar ) . 
Fruits, dried, freshly stewed ( without sugar ) . 

Whatever alleged outlandish thing the gastric 
intelligence may demand, it will be right to eat 
it. Besides the likelihood of having to eat at 
bedtime and very early in the morning, it may 
be necessary to eat during the forenoon and af- 
ternoon. 

Good drainage of the body will contribute 
largely to good physical maintenance. The pa- 
tient should not go thirsty. Besides the fluids 
that go with the meals, hot water should gener- 
ally be taken about four times daily. The best 
temperature of a hot drink is that which best 
suits the patient. On a hot day one can drink 
cool water enough for drainage purposes, but on 
cool and cold days experience very much favors 
the hot-water beverage. When one is eating 
three times a day the best times for hot water 
will be an hour to an hour and a half before each 
meal and just enough to quench thirst at bed- 

40 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



time. Two glasses of hot water is a small quan- 
tity to take at one sitting. Any adult can easily 
take five glasses in ten minutes and ten glasses 
in thirty minutes. Such quantities are sometimes 
taken necessarily s with much good and no harm 
as the result, but this is only mentioned with a 
view to showing that two glasses constitute only 
a moderate quantity of hot water to take at one 
sitting. 

One's conscious mind may take undue advan- 
tage of the subconscious mind; it often does; 
the subconscious through feeling pointing one 
way, the conscious through reason, example or 
other motive, leading to diametrically opposite 
ways. The subconscious mind often gives way, 
not without protest, however, allowing prece- 
dence to mind in many cases in which the two are 
at variance. By the time we have lived long 
enough, those of us who work will have noticed 
many times that we like to have our meals in 
peace. We will have had occasion to notice also, 
as Shakespeare did, that "unquiet meals make 
ill digestions." Still more strongly do our feel- 
ings prompt us to rest from bodily effort and 
especially from mental effort a while after meals. 
Animals rest after eating, so do all peoples of all 
nations, excepting the vidlim of master and cir- 
cumstance in the city; but often we allow our- 
selves to be lead into disregarding these feelings 

41 



Messages to Mothers 



by which our subconscious mind would direct us, 
and into disregarding the universal custom of 
resting an hour at noon. We sit still enough 
bodily at our meals, but vigorous talking, read- 
ing or any other volitional mental effort pro- 
longed throughout the sitting costs power. The 
pregnant woman cannot spare this power be- 
cause it is all needed for digestion. She should 
not talk at all at meal-times after she begins 
eating nor for an hour afterwards. I know that 
is hard for a woman not to do, and she may 
need help for the purpose, some one with 
authority to say: You are not giving your 
stomach a fair chance, or " unquiet meals make 
ill digestions," and this may prove more effective 
if the monitor does not forget to mention that 
Shakespeare said so. 

No matter how weak and delicate a patient 
may be, there will be power enough present, 
ready and available for digestion of anything 
she may really need; but the mind can cause 
the diversion of that power, during meals and 
the hour after eating, to effort of mind and 
body for which the stomach's allotment of 
power is appropriated. The little, busy, speedy, 
thin woman will, by rapid talk during meals 
and a bustle of business directly after eating, 
use up all the power present and available for 
digestion, so that the stomach is helpless, cannot 

42 



Sickness of Pregnancy 



even supply the gastric juice to save the mess 
from rotting. Good thing, then, and very neces- 
sary, that the gastric intelligence should order it 
up. Nothing wrong with the works, only the 
power is switched off. The treatment of the 
case when a meal has been thrown up consists 
of lying down, head low, no volitional mental 
effort as in talking, listening or reading. Then 
in two to five minutes the patient will feel like 
eating again, which will be the proper thing 
to do. 

To prevent this action of the stomach in 
general, the patient must reduce her expenditure 
of power. It is quite likely that it will be 
enough to eliminate the mental effort of read- 
ing, talking and listening; that much will help 
immensely and may be enough. If not enough, 
then the patient must eliminate that work which 
entails mental effort and anxiety, such as skilled 
work. Specifically, she should not read anything, 
should neither make nor receive calls, should do 
nothing that can be left undone or for others to 
do. It is of the utmost importance to have meals 
in peace and quiet, and rest from work, especially 
mental work, at least one hour after each meal, 
and during that hour she should not even be 
spoken to. 

The patient may succeed very well by carry- 
ing out these instructions only halfway; she 

43 



Messages to Mothers 



may find herself an easy case; if so, so much 
the better. Certainly a woman will not do all 
these things unless forced by illness to do them. 
However, it is my duty to supply the maximum 
possible requirement; let each one help herself 
to what she needs. There is no reason for 
restraint from those pastimes which afford 
pleasure without drawing more than very lightly 
upon the patient's power. 

Sickness of pregnancy affects chiefly and most 
severely those who most employ their minds; 
accordingly, educated women come in for a large 
share of it for the reasons explained. The illiter- 
ate woman who does skilled labor will also suffer, 
and, I am told, they do in Japan where women 
not only work but work somewhat speedily and 
put skill and art into about everything they do. 
Among negro women in the South this sickness 
is scarcely heard of. Among illiterate women 
whom I have known, there seems to have been 
none of it. Unskilled hard labor is not unfavora- 
ble to the health of the pregnant woman; it 
really costs little power even if it does require 
strong instrumentalities. 



44 



Chapter III 

Natural Infant Feeding- 

The Reason Why It Fails and the 
Way It Will Succeed 

NOTHING short of disabling misfor- 
tune or actual disease should be al- 
lowed by any mother to excuse her 
from feeding her infant in the one and 
only natural, safe and best way. The Great In- 
finite Intelligence has provided this one way of 
feeding the infant. The little finite human 
mind, influenced and aided by its higher educa- 
tion, is miserably failing in its attempts to de- 
vise and supply substitute schemes for Nature's 
one prescribed method. Admitting that the sub- 
stitute schemes often end well, who can say that 
the natural way would not have ended better? 
Who can say at what age of later life the right 
and the wrong, the better and the worse, the 
natural and the artificial, of infant care ceases 
to exert any influence in favor of good or evil, 
health or disease, strength or weakness, success 
or failure ? At any rate, it is the known evil re- 
sults of the substitution of the artificial for the 
natural that must influence us to abide by the 
natural way of infant feeding. " Statistics from 

45 



Messages to Mothers 



America and Europe show that in all large cities 
infant mortality has been steadily increasing for 
the past twenty-five years," wrote Dr. L. Em- 
mett Holt in 1898, and he blames artificial feed- 
ing more than all other alleged causes. In Holt's 
experience it has been exceedingly rare to find a 
healthy child who has been reared in a tenement 
house and who has been artificially fed from 
birth. He also observes that while among the 
poor the capacity for maternal nursing seems to 
be diminishing year by year, among the better 
classes it has come to be the exception and not 
the rule. In Holt's private practice not one-third 
of the mothers have been able, though willing, 
to nurse their infants. The greatest number of 
deaths during the first year of life among rich 
and poor alike are caused by digestive disorders 
that are due, says Holt, to artificial feeding. 

No source of a married woman's happiness is 
so prolific as the group of all-round good boys 
and girls that she is raising. Whether this group 
is only in prospect, or is present, or has scattered, 
each to where he or she can best thrive, is there 
any other sphere or any other purpose, to which 
a married woman can devote the best attention 
and effort of her life, that will be productive of 
so much pleasure of such supreme quality for so 
great a length of time? But the achievement 
of this happiness is imperiled by some dangers 

46 



Natural Infant Feeding 1 

to health and life for which we do not feel our- 
selves to blame, and other dangers to health and 
life for which we do find ourselves to blame. 
A death, a chronic illness, a life of imbecility, or 
insanity, having come to pass, can we say it was 
or was not due primarily to one or more depar- 
tures from the course prescribed by Nature for 
the raising of children? 

A brute knows enough for the perpetuation of 
its kind, even under great difficulties. That is 
knowing much, and that knowledge is of won- 
derfully good utilitarian quality. Stripped of 
education, are we not in our illiteracy just as 
well equipped with knowledge as the brute? 
However, being improved by education and be- 
ing moved and influenced into allowing ourselves 
to be governed by the spirit of learning, we have, 
wisely enough, determined that our children 
shall be of better quality than we were, that we 
shall do better for them than our poor illiterate 
parents did for us, better than our poor and less 
learned cousins are doing for their children. 
More than that, thanks to our learning and in- 
genuity, we are able to reduce to a minimum the 
care, drudgery and self-sacrifice that our poor 
illiterate mothers endured for our sakes. 

The bright idea is suggested, or occurs to the 
educated mother, so early as to permit its em- 
ployment to the fullest extent of its alleged 

47 



Messages to Mothers 



utility, or at any rate the idea comes and is 
adopted in time to relieve the mother from that 
close confinement to home, that untidiness of 
dress and appearance and that constant associa- 
tion with the baby that must prevail when it is 
fed in the natural way. The bright idea will be 
fruitful of still more and greater good; bottle 
feeding of the baby will permit the mother to 
enjoy much of the freedom of the woman who 
has no baby. What an immense difference in 
favor of the mother does the modern bottle feed- 
ing make! Great is the temptation, therefore, 
to resort to it, even when there are no other than 
the mother's selfish motives for doing so. Only 
the good ends are thought of, possible evils are 
not considered, trouble is not looked for; only 
successes of bottle feeding are paraded. As for 
the many complete failures and the many more 
partial failures, the less said the better; the sub- 
ject is painful to those who know, and they are 
not believed when their views, derived from ex- 
perience, are offered. 

There is an uncatalogued list of deaths, 
chronic ills and imbecilities for which, as cause, 
some details of infant care seem, by the circum- 
stances of the case, to be indicated as responsible. 
If, in the survey of an infant's life, nothing were 
to be found wrong or unnatural, except that it 
is being, or was, fed in an artificial way, that fadt 

48 



Natural Infant Feeding- 

alone would prove to be a sufficient wrong to ac- 
count for any evil in the catalogue that might 
be present or follow. Bottle-fed babies that were 
sick and growing from bad to worse, under the 
otherwise most favorable circumstances and con- 
ditions, have recovered with apparently miracu- 
lous haste when restored to the natural way of 
feeding by the help of some other baby's mother, 
or a milk-giving goat, showing that the illness 
and danger to life in the case, not to mention 
the enduring unhappiness that might have re- 
sulted, were entirely due to the departure from 
the natural and only right way of doing this 
particular detail. 

Many babies die from no other cause than that 
their mothers fail to feed them naturally. It is 
disease that sooner or later kills, or more or less 
irretrievably injures the child and damages all 
its prospects. In case of death the disease is 
named as cause, with no reference, however, to 
the cause of the disease. The number of deaths 
is great, but the number of cases of illness aris- 
ing out of the unnatural procedure called bottle 
feeding is vastly greater. We display our suc- 
cesses, but keep the curtain drawn down over 
our failures. " That's the way we lost our first," 
said a man to me; "my wife failed to nurse it 
and substitute methods failed." But that was 
said in confidence and was not allowed to serve 

49 



Messages to Mothers 



as a lesson to the present and prospective edu- 
cated mothers of the community. 

Within my little sphere of work and observa- 
tion there have been women who failed to feed 
their babies naturally. In these cases the ladies 
were so well and strong that there seemed to be 
no reason why their milk supply should so pre- 
maturely fail. Why does the milk supply fail 
prematurely? My answer follows and is a mat- 
ter of simple instruction; where all intentions 
are good, it will enable the mother to abide by 
the natural and only safe way of baby feeding, 
if she is in a reasonably good and comfortable 
state of health. 

The physician is, of course, dominated by his 
views of the case in hand, which views are gen- 
erally in accord with the consensus of profes- 
sional opinion in regard to such matters, — all 
of which is proper so far as the physician is con- 
cerned, however much the basis of such opin- 
ion — even the consensus of opinion — may be 
open to suspicion. The physician in turn domi- 
nates the patient, presumably with her consent, 
but sometimes without such consent, either of 
the patient or any of her family, as, for example, 
when confinement occurs in a hospital alleged to 
be first class in respect to all material and intel- 
lectual equipment. It does happen that able- 
bodied mothers are discharged from such hospi- 

50 



Natural Infant Feeding 

tals with infants which they are unable to feed, 
because their mammary glands have without 
their knowledge or consent been "dried up" by 
means of drugs. This is the physician's way of 
anticipating and settling at once the question of 
the mother's ability to feed or not to feed her 
baby. 

In other cases the mother will have fed the 
baby one, two, three or more months; then it 
will be apparent that the baby is not thriving, 
that the milk supply is scant, or deficient in 
some detail of quality. Tests of the mother's 
milk are made and show it to be defective in im- 
portant respe6ts. The bottle method is then in- 
troduced and the breasts are allowed to go out of 
service, and once out of service for even a few 
days, the mammary glands cannot, so far as I 
know, be induced to resume their milk-giving 
function. 

The past and present examples of mothers, 
educated and cultivated, easily feeding their 
babies naturally, are enough to justify the con- 
viction that these able-bodied mothers who are 
being "dried up" by design can also feed their 
babies. I will show and am prepared to demon- 
strate that safer means based on simpler reason- 
ing easily give us not only better but perfectly 
natural, good, old-fashioned luck in feeding the 
baby. The prospective mother having been duly 

51 



Messages to Mothers 



warned of an innocent-looking danger that 
would imperil the chief enduring source of her 
life's happiness, I must ask her attention to the 
same principles and the same reasoning that I 
have employed in explaining the sickness of 
pregnancy and its treatment. 

We understand now that for the organization 
and growth of the fetus the mother supplies the 
structure materials and the power. After birth 
the mother still supplies the baby with structure 
and fuel materials, but out of the fuels the baby 
evolves its own power for its growth and func- 
tions. Until the beginning of the weaning period 
the mother in the natural course of events still 
continues to eat and digest an additional share 
of foods and to elaborate the same into milk for 
the baby. The power which the mother appro- 
priates for this extra digestion and this elabora- 
tion is here the one chief item of interest, the 
one thing to be understood. Conditions being at 
all favorable, the mother will certainly take in 
and digest foods enough for all purposes, and 
the power sufficient to elaborate plenty of milk 
for the baby will certainly be available for that 
purpose. The always consistent nature of the 
animal — the subconscious mind — certainly al- 
ways attends to this matter so perfectly, so natu- 
rally, so easily and, I may say, so automatically 
that one needs take no cognizance of the process 

52 



Natural Infant Feeding 

and needs no learning to aid it. That the mother 
requires more than her personal need of food is 
a simple fa£t only to be noticed as such, but this 
facl; is not to influence the mother in her selec- 
tion of foods, neither in respecl to quantity nor 
quality. Conscious knowledge of extra needs is 
very likely to induce interference with that 
natural selection which is prompted by the sub- 
conscious mind so unerringly and so perfectly 
that conscious aid or interference simply hinders 
and renders selection inefficient and erroneous. 
I mean to say that the illiterate nursing mother 
makes a better selection of foods without con- 
scious thought than the learned mother does 
with the aid of what she reads or hears on the 
subject. It will be enough to say that the mother 
should have what she feels she needs and there- 
fore wants. 

A case presenting itself, we assume that the 
mother is in a reasonably good, comfortable and 
useful state of health, that she takes food enough, 
that her milk-producing laboratory is in good 
order, that power for its operation is ready and 
available. On these points it is not likely to be 
necessary to make any inquiry or offer any in- 
struction, so well does the subconscious mind 
take care of them when not interfered with by 
the conscious mind. The milk supply, however, 
does not materialize in the case. 

53 



Messages to Mothers 



As already explained in the discussion of 
power in physiological functions, an hour of 
purely mental work costs as much power as two 
and one-half hours of hard manual labor. The 
illiterate mother has plenty of power even 
though she performs hard labor, because a day's 
manual labor will not ordinarily exhaust her 
supply of power so far as to leave her without 
enough for the elaboration of milk. When ap- 
propriated for necessary or unnecessary mental 
effort, at rapid rates of speed, the quantity of 
power used will often be so great that the supply 
will become exhausted, the woman will be tired, 
the milk supply will for an afternoon or an 
evening fail. A maximum combination of talk- 
ing, reading, music and study, with some manual 
labor, and all these at a high rate of speed, will 
leave no power for the elaboration of milk. This 
view of the matter will readily be confirmed by 
the educated mother of experience who has cor- 
rectly fed all her babies. She will remember an 
afternoon, some callers, speedy and lively gossip, 
a riot of voices, jolly time, rather strenuous 
though, and that evening there was only the 
scantiest supply of milk for the baby. 

Elaborating milk is an extra duty, just as 
carrying and supporting the fetus was. It makes 
an extra demand for power, just as any extra 
duty would do. Compensation must be made by 

54 



Natural Infant Feeding" 

omitting some other expenditures of power, by 
leaving some other things undone. Power for 
the elaboration of milk will surely always be 
present and available; but designed, prolonged 
and speedy mental effort will cause that power 
to be diverted and appropriated for the mental 
effort. 

While it is the educated mother who is most 
likely to fail to feed her baby, it is not at all 
necessary to argue against higher education of 
women on this account; but the educated 
mother, while nursing a baby, must certainly, 
under the circumstances, allow her mind to re- 
main mostly at rest; she must abstain from vol- 
untary and designed thinking and from mental 
work which involves and induces such thinking. 
There is no objection to automatic thinking, be- 
cause that does not seem to use up power appre- 
ciably. It will be enough to glance at the head- 
lines of the daily paper, to look at the table of 
contents of a magazine, to see only a minimum 
number of the quietest friends. To have help to 
do all her housework and then use her time all 
the more for mental effort, makes matters so 
much the worse. It is an advantage to a woman 
to have to do her own housework, if for no other 
reason than that it keeps her from mental effort 
that is much more exhaustive of power. To read 
regularly a morning paper and an evening paper 

55 



Messages to Mothers 



is in itself an exhausting vice, not to mention 
much other magazine and novel reading and 
talking that the educated woman will do. The 
milk supply fails in quantity and quality because 
the power, which is present and available for 
elaborating milk, is diverted to operate the brain 
in the performance of all the mental work and 
play that the educated woman seems to think it 
her duty to do and to continue doing through 
the periods of pregnancy and nursing. 

It seems hardly necessary to specify further 
what the nursing mother will now do when she 
finds the baby's natural milk supply deficient in 
quantity or quality. From what has been said 
of the cause, she will understand the remedy 
without further explanation. But repetition is 
favorable to impression of the learner, so a very 
brief summary, defining the natural manage- 
ment of the case, even at the expense of repeat- 
ing some things that have already been said, will, 
I am sure, be advantageous to the learned mother 
who is seriously concerned in this matter. The 
mother, while nursing a baby, is supposed to be 
in a reasonably good, comfortable and useful 
state of health. She should and she certainly 
may eat anything she feels she needs and as 
much as she feels she needs. When it is under- 
stood that she should limit her selections to such 
things as are included within the range of natural 

56 



Natural Infant Feeding- 

foods, those that are least affected by artificial 
modification and conglomeration and that are 
fresh or in a good state of preservation, then it 
may be said she may eat anything and every- 
thing she wants and as much as she wants. The 
want that is to be respected and satisfied is that 
which is based upon a need, not that which is 
based upon the like of a thing. The "need" 
wants get us into no trouble; the " like " wants 
lead us beyond the range of natural foods into 
that of the artificial, and the unduly mixed and 
conglomerated things that are contrived to 
satisfy likes rather than needs. 

Experience, of the individual, of the family, 
of the community, of the race, is the teacher in 
matters of food selection. Of what weight, for 
example, is the adverse opinion of the chemist in 
regard to rice in the presence of the fact that 
rice is, and for the longest time has been, the 
most used and most repeatedly used of all cereal 
grains. Feeling in this matter of selection is re- 
liable, reason is unreliable. Food selection is a 
province of the subconscious mind, which will so 
persistently insist on minding its own business 
that the educated conscious mind of the same 
person cannot assist it in selection; much less 
can the educated mind of the do6tor, or any other 
person, meddle with a patient's own function of 
selection. But while that very useful member of 

57 



Messages to Mothers 



society can never arbitrarily select and success- 
fully prescribe foods, he can and should assist the 
patient to the true conclusions from experience 
in general and her experience in particular, and 
assist her to the correct natural interpretations of 
her longings and bring her back to the domina- 
tion of her own subconscious mind when learn- 
ing, which did not happen to be science, has led 
her astray in the matter of selection. 

The nursing mother must have good diges- 
tion; digestion requires power. From the mo- 
ment she begins to eat she must refrain from 
such mental effort and be free from all such an- 
noyance as will use up power and cause diversion 
of the same from the function of digestion. 
" Unquiet meals make ill digestions." The same 
personal quiet must continue during her undis- 
turbed rest of about an hour after each meal. 
Since it is mental effort that consumes power so 
fast and causes the diversion of so much of it 
from the apparatus of digestion, it is from mental 
effort that the nursing mother must especially 
abstain during and for an hour after meals. The 
rule of resting after meals need not be so strictly 
enforced in regard to any easy and trifling duties 
that may seem necessary and that she may wish 
to do and find pleasure in doing. But the abso- 
lute rest, relaxation, of mind and body in an easy- 
chair, and alone, will generally be the best thing 

58 



Natural Infant Feeding 

under the circumstances. Strenuous effort at 
quieting the mind should, of course, not be at- 
tempted, because that would involve the very 
mental effort that we are trying to avoid. Let 
the automatic thinking go on as it will; let it 
busy itself with the passing objects seen from the 
window, or with the passing subjects of memory; 
the hour will thus be made pleasant and will 
seem to pass quickly. Automatic thinking does 
not seem to consume power appreciably. It is 
the intentional, volitional thinking that uses up 
power faster than hard labor. The recumbent 
position is not favorable to digestion. The semi- 
recumbent position is the best, as on a reclining- 
chair, or on a lounge which permits head and 
shoulders to remain considerably elevated and 
the abdominal wall to be relaxed. 

The mother adopting these instructions will 
at first watch the clock for the expiration of the 
arbitrary hour; later on, after some weeks, it 
will be her feeling that she will watch for the 
moment when she may go to work. The pro- 
priety of the rest will be felt; that there is no 
power just then available for work will also be 
felt. The power is there, but it is being used for 
digestion; it can be diverted and used for work, 
but then digestion would be defective. In about 
an hour power becomes available for work; feel- 
ing informs one of that fact and prompts her to 

59 



Messages to Mothers 



go about her duties. From that moment rest is 
no longer necessary, desirable nor agreeable. To 
rest somewhat in this fashion is, as any one must 
know, in accord with universal custom of many 
familiar animals and all peoples. Under artifi- 
cial conditions and under the mastery of em- 
ployer, this natural custom, I may say this 
natural law, of having our meals in peace and a 
rest afterwards, is much disregarded, with no 
gain in the matter of work done by the indi- 
vidual and certainly with deterioration of the 
individual health. 

The mother being in a reasonably good state 
of health, it should not for a moment be believed 
that she cannot feed her baby naturally. The 
mammary glands should be assumed to be in 
good condition, power is certainly present and 
available for the elaboration of milk, the subcon- 
scious mind of the woman is to be trusted abso- 
lutely for the good condition and good working 
order of every detail required under the circum- 
stances. There remains, then, only one thing for 
the conscious mind to see to; that is, let not the 
power of the woman be diverted for mental ef- 
fort to such an extent that not enough is left 
available for the elaboration of milk. Experience 
will soon teach her the limit to which she can 
safely go in the direction of mental effort and 
yet do justice to the baby. 

60 



Chapter IV 

The Maternity Nurse 

Spontaneous Intuition Compared 
with Artificial Training 



IN REGARD to the details of infant care, 
the thing the mother feels like doing, or the 
way she feels like doing it, will be about 
right, because it is so prompted and directed 
by her subconscious mind, her inerrant nature. 
The mother will not allow herself to do that 
which she feels is not right in infant care and she 
should not permit the same to be done by a 
nurse, however learned and artificially trained, 
who may prove so dominant as to insist on it as 
authorized by what she has read or been taught 
on the subject. 

The baby's health will to some extent depend 
on the mother's health, which is therefore an ob- 
ject of solicitude. The mother will have her wits 
about her and will not quite need to resign her- 
self into the absolute guardianship of the nurse. 
The mother's subconscious mind will still con- 
tinue to be her guardian intelligence and is still 
to be trusted in the matter of details of her 
personal welfare and especially in the matter of 
the selection of her foods. The mind of a domi- 

61 



Messages to Mothers 



nant nurse, stocked with its artificial learning 
and its contempt for the real scientific lessons 
and examples of Nature, should not be allowed 
to induce the mother to do or select anything to 
which she feels an aversion. 

An Example. — A complication of chronic di- 
gestive disorders, lasting many years, had its 
origin during confinement when the artificially 
wise nurse insisted on the patient consuming 
spoon victuals that she did not want, instead of 
the common, plain, ordinary diet that the mother 
did want, but which the nurse did not allow her 
to have. 

Second Example. — An artificially trained 
nurse holds a baby balanced on her left hand 
while with her right she bathes it with a sponge. 
The baby is in an extreme state of alarm during 
the bath and cries all that time in a manner 
heartrending and damaging to the mother. 
The procedure takes place out of the mother's 
sight where the dominating nurse has her own 
artificial way unobserved and uncriticized, allow- 
ing the inference that the nurse and her modern 
method are correct enough, but that it is the 
baby that is naughty. This was done thirty 
days. The mother seemed unable to obtain any 
good reason for the baby's crying and did not 
find out until her mother came, saw and rightly 
explained that the alarmed state of the baby 

62 



The Maternity Nurse 



was due to finding itself abruptly grasped and 
lifted to mid-air and there poised in the unnat- 
ural situation of nothing for its head and limbs 
to touch or rest upon. 

Daily to the extent of thirty days a state of 
mental terror was combined for the baby with 
its bath, and as many times was the anxious 
mother alarmed for the safety of the child. It is 
at least our fear that this baby will suffer from 
future evil results of the impression thus ruth- 
lessly made and deepened and intensified by rep- 
etition. The baby's health depends upon that 
of the mother to some extent; if the mother's 
health suffer from this repeated agony, still so 
much the worse for the baby. 

Third Example. — Another artificially trained 
nurse, and I am told there were more of her 
kind at the artificial institution of her origin, 
had a reason why the baby should not be allowed 
to the breast until after the expiration of three 
days. The mother's respect for up-to-date learn- 
ing allowed her to be dominated into yielding to 
the nurse, and so the baby was forced to begin its 
career with a three days' fast. 

Our conscious mind does not clearly enlighten 
us on the nature and remote results of the 
agonizing impression made on the plastic instru- 
mentality of the infant mind by an enforced ab- 
solute fast during the first three days of its life, 

63 



Messages to Mothers 



but our subconscious mind persists in presenting 
the feeling that such unnatural, cruel and un- 
necessary procedure can only be fruitful of future 
evil to the victim and incidental unhappiness to 
those responsible for him. 

The misguided nurse will suffer no evil conse- 
quences for her blunders; for her mistakes the 
innocent victim will suffer and incidentally the 
victim's mother, the family, and finally, but al- 
most surely, the state. The nurse is not respon- 
sible, the mother is. No mother should for a 
moment resign to a disinterested stranger the 
direction of the affairs of her baby, and her own 
feelings and common sense should be regarded 
always as a higher authority for action than 
what she reads or what "they say" on the sub- 
ject. 

The baby was forced to fast three days before 
it was allowed access to its mother's breast; 
it was, however, given warm water during this 
time. These must have been three days of 
agonizing " lock-out " from its natural food, its 
natural drink, its natural medicine, its natural 
and necessary function of developing the nipple 
and from its only occupation. These were also 
three days of arrested development for the 
baby and three days of doubt, anxiety, fear and 
suspicion on the part of the mother who trusted 
in the latest learning and who must have felt 

64 



The Maternity Nurse 



that she was ignoring her own inherited, natural, 
maternal wisdom. 

There was also neglect or omission of the 
necessary function of relieving the mammary 
glands, which only the baby can best and most 
naturally do, which should always be the baby's 
occupation, entered upon when, after its bath, 
dressing, sleep and rest from the ordeal of its 
advent, it awakens and begins to struggle with 
evident motive and object in view. The mam- 
mary secretion, whether it be called milk or 
colostrum during the first three days, purges the 
baby; that is natural and therefore proper, and 
no attempt should be made to improve upon this 
detail. It is decidedly unsafe to make radical 
changes in methods established by Nature. 

Still another painful and distressing evil re- 
sult of the new idea was the intense suffering of 
the mother for two months from diseased breasts, 
from which, after three months, she was finally 
relieved by the natural wisdom and labor of a 
nurse who had no artificial training or learning, 
but who had natural intelligence and natural 
experience unadulterated with the utterances of 
those who have no children for the alleged bene- 
fit of those who have. And we have not yet the 
last of such indiscreet haste to adopt an alleged 
new idea where the old idea had proven itself 
perfectly good in a case where so much is at 

65 



Messages to Mothers 



stake. There remain yet the questions: What 
lasting harm does it leave impressed upon the 
mother? What evil-bearing impression does it 
leave upon the child? 

Of new ideas "many are called but few are 
chosen " for adoption. The affairs of maternity 
should not at any rate be allowed to serve as oc- 
casion for experiment. There is altogether too 
much at stake in these affairs. Vastly better and 
safer is it to abide by ideas and methods that 
have survived from time immemorial and are 
sanctioned by usages that are universal in such 
cases than to adopt any that are but just come 
into local existence or have at best been but short 
lived. With all due respect for the learning and 
training of the nurse for other purposes, I should 
in maternity cases vote for the nurse who is sim- 
ply a good plain woman, ready and willing to 
perform her part in a manner consistent with 
both the maternal instinct of the mother and of 
the nurse herself. The maternity nurse with 
natural experience only, has at present a better 
reputation for safe natural service than the 
learned maternity nurse with artificial training. 



66 



Chapter V 

Ills of the Weaning- Period 

Their Causes, Results, Prevention 
and Cure 

WHETHER the baby is fed natu- 
rally or otherwise, the time comes 
when it will express signs of dis- 
satisfaction with its subsistence, 
signs of additional wants, longings and urgent 
needs. These begin to appear at any time from 
seven to twelve months of age and, exception- 
ally, earlier and later than seven and twelve 
months. The baby becomes restless, cross, cry- 
ing more or less, pushing itself from the mother's 
breast or turning with plainly apparent displeas- 
ure from the sight of the coming bottle. It 
does not appear to be sick but we know it is not 
happy. If it has up to this time been well, that 
fa6t speaks well for the care it has received and 
there should be no reason why it should not 
continue well. Even teething will not generally 
be a disturbing cause sufficient to account for 
the unhappy, the distressed and worried condi- 
tion of the baby. If the baby has arrived at the 
proper age, seven months or more, or, disregard- 
ing its age, if it is big enough and strong 

67 



Messages to Mothers 



enough, or seems old enough, even though it is 
not so, it will not only be proper, but it will be 
necessary, to consider possible additional wants 
on its part and therefore additional needs. 

The baby is an animal in a state of nature, 
however artificial its material environment may 
already be. Personally, it is not yet artificial- 
ized; it has yet no likes and dislikes that can be 
regarded as having resulted from experience; it 
has yet no artificial habits. When, therefore, it 
wants a thing, we may seriously conclude that 
it needs the thing wanted. The baby wants its 
mother's presence, her sympathy, her contact, 
her embraces. The baby needs these and it 
would fail to achieve its best possible develop- 
ment of body and mind if deprived of these 
even in part, and it would not live long if to- 
tally deprived of these details of infant care. 

In the case of the young baby it seems to me 
that if we omit the word like and do not use the 
idea it conveys, we will so much the better un- 
derstand the subject of infant needs. Likes are 
acquired, are associated with experience, are mat- 
ters of habit and may involve the use of things 
that are not natural foods. Wants, however, are 
constitutional and are expressions of the subcon- 
scious mind's demands for natural foods which 
the baby may never have had and of which it 
can have no conscious conception nor impression 

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Ills of the Weaning- Period 

based on experience. To say that a baby wants 
a certain item of food includes the idea of its 
liking that food, but excludes the idea, as we 
wish it to, of the liking being acquired and 
prejudiced by experience or even the slightest 
semblance of habit. That the baby likes what 
it wants goes without saying. When the baby 
wants a food it will certainly need it, and so 
serious and urgent is that need that the baby 
will not thrive without the obje6l of that want. 
This statement is easily substantiated by experi- 
ence, and some experience of this character can 
be found in almost every family; but it should 
not be taken to indicate any difficulties in pros- 
peel for the baby. A baby is the easiest, most 
submissive and most compromising character to 
deal with as a patient. 

The baby's wants will have reference generally 
to classes of foods rather than to any special 
food of a class. When, for example, it wants a 
starchy food it will be satisfied with anv cereal 
grain, or any starchy root, that has been used by 
a great many people for a great length of time 
and has thus been proved to be a good food and 
capable of being oft repeated. When the baby 
wants meat, any lean meat will be satisfactory. 
So when it wants fat meat, it will not be very 
particular as to what variety. The baby will, of 
course, get the best there is and everything fresh 

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Messages to Mothers 



or in a good state of preservation. The baby's 
diet should certainly not include anything but 
natural foods in a simple, unconglomerated, un- 
modified state of preparation. 

What are the best foods? The answer, made 
conclusive by observation and experience before 
the food expert and the chemist were born, is, 
those foods that have been used by any great 
number of people any great length of time and 
have been most repeatedly used during that 
time, they are the best foods. Those foods that 
we naturally and without prejudice select most 
frequently and which we may therefore designate 
as the most " repeatable " foods are for that rea- 
son the best foods. It is easier to see this than to 
prove it, and what is the use of proving what is 
so easily seen? Rice, for example, is the best of 
all cereal grains, because it is by anybody more 
often " repeatable," is used by more hundreds of 
millions of people and has probably been in use 
longer than any other cereal grain. The potato 
is by far the most "repeatable" vegetable in use 
among the most civilized peoples. Beef is by far 
the most "repeatable" meat. Beef fat is the 
most " repeatable " fat in ordinary use among us 
in the United States of America. Speaking of 
beef fat we, of course, include butter; but but- 
ter is not pure, as the milk cannot be entirely 
separated from it; the one to two per cent of 

70 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

milk remaining in the butter soon spoils, and 
spoils the butter, so that in addition to being an 
impure fat it is also a stale fat. 

Among oils used as foods, the olive oil is the 
most "repeatable." I mention only the best rep- 
resentatives of classes of foods that we must 
depend on. I do not mean to say that we should 
live on these exclusively, but I do mean to say 
that the subconscious mind chooses these items 
most frequently, and the choice is a matter of 
feeling and not reason. The conscious mind with 
its reasonings could never cause beef to be super- 
seded by mutton, or turkey, or chicken. No other 
vegetable that we have in the United States 
could be made to replace the potato. It seems 
to me that we can use olive oil every day for life. 
We can use cotton-seed oil every day for a while, 
but we cannot long continue its use. We may 
try it designedly, but then we soon find that di- 
gestion fails. One oil may be as digestible and 
in every way just as meritorious as the other 
and we may not be able to tell them apart and 
we may not be able to detect any adulteration 
of one by the other; we may be satisfied to have 
our meat, fish and potatoes fried in either, or a 
mixture of the two oils, so far as the reasoning 
conscious mind is concerned, but you cannot fool 
the stomach with your cotton-seed oil, not even 
with your slightest adulteration. People will 

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Messages to Mothers 



say that cotton-seed oil disagrees with them; I 
would say that the stomach disagrees on the 
selection of it, and refuses to do its work if any 
cotton-seed oil is present. Whenever a person 
tells me he cannot use oil, I feel pretty certain 
that he has never fairly tried pure olive oil. 

I am not forgetting to mention lard as a 
handy, "repeatable" and much used fat; but I 
leave pork and all food produces of pork out of 
consideration except to find a fault with pork 
which may supply a motive sufficient to induce 
some people to abstain from it. The law of 
Moses very stridlly forbade the use of pork. In 
Leviticus, eleventh chapter, the seventh verse 
reads: "And the swine, though he divide the 
hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not 
the cud; he is unclean to you." Moses must have 
been very particular in regard to this item of the 
law, and did not want to leave room for any mis- 
take or misunderstanding on the question of 
pork, so he said further, in the eighth verse: " Of 
their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase 
shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you." 
That plainly meant the exclusion of lard and did 
not even permit a Jew to eat a piece of pie 
whereof the crust was shortened with lard. I do 
not for a moment doubt that there were the best 
of reasons for this unconditional prohibition of 
pork; I believe these reasons were deduced from 

72 



Ills of the Weaning' Period 

ages of experience which finally taught the nec- 
essity of the law as formulated by Moses on this 
subject of swine as a source of food. I do not 
know what these reasons were nor of any way of 
finding out. The best we can do is to see if 
there is at present any good reason why we 
should not even touch pork, and, if we find good 
cause for total abstinence from pork in our time, 
we may assume that it is the same as that which 
existed in the time of Moses. 

Pork is extremely convenient and " repeatable " 
for all purposes for which it is used, and we all 
like it the world over in the shape of chops, 
roast, spareribs, pigs' feet, sausage, bacon, ham, 
and the lard in our pie crust and along with the 
several good things that are fried with lard. I 
would not stir up a hornet's nest in the pursuit 
of this pork question; I do not want to be un- 
derstood as suggesting any change in the com- 
munity's attitude toward pork. I am interested 
only in that small percentage of people who 
have ills from causes which do not trouble the 
community in general. I am only dispensing 
a little utilitarian learning for the benefit of the 
few exceptional men, women and children who 
need it. These few, however, make up a large 
sum in the aggregate, and an affliction of one 
member of a family is a matter of concern to 
the whole family; and the afflictions of a few in 

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Messages to Mothers 



the community are matters of concern to the 
community in general. It therefore appears to 
me that there must be a wide-spread interest in 
any reasons there may be why some people 
should abstain from pork absolutely. I have 
found one reason; it may seem disappointing to 
have found no more, but this one reason is big 
enough to equal several ordinary reasons. I 
found it thirty-five years ago and have had an 
eye on it ever since, so I am sure it is there and 
that it persists under all conditions and circum- 
stances. 

In many persons pork, however small the 
quantity used, produces a tendency to suppura- 
tion. This tendency shows itself by the appear- 
ance of collections of pus ranging in magnitude 
anywhere from a very little pustule to a large 
abscess. Pustules, sties, felons, boils, carbuncles 
and abscesses are familiar and are due to pork. 
Those who abstain absolutely from all produces 
of the swine do not have anything of the kind. 
When a wound suppurates more or less and is a 
long time healing under conditions otherwise 
favorable, that will be due to pork. These proc- 
esses of suppuration may occur in any part of 
the body, and may do irreparable damage. Ears 
have been destroyed, kidneys have been dam- 
aged, eyes have been injured and pretty faces 
have been disfigured by this process of suppura- 

74 



Ills of the Weaning; Period 

tion. I suggest that anybody who has pustules, 
sties, felons, boils, carbuncles, abscesses or sup- 
purating sore eyes, will be able to refer their ap- 
pearance to their use of pork several times within 
the two or three weeks preceding; and that, 
when one finds that in her case pork produces 
this tendency to suppuration, it will be wise for 
her to abstain absolutely. 

That baby to which we are supposed to be 
giving our present attention is now anywhere 
from seven to twelve months of age. It is rest- 
less, ill-tempered from cause, and refuses its usual 
food about one-third of the times that the same 
is offered. The parents are worried, do6lor is 
consulted, questions are asked, details are heard, 
age is considered, and the verdi6l is that the baby 
is weaning itself; it is tapering off on milk and, 
of course, needs and therefore wants other foods. 
What shall we give it? ask the parents. That 
is a question that would only be asked by a par- 
ent that is learned or at least influenced by the 
learning of others. The illiterate woman would 
not even think on this matter; she knows intui- 
tively what to give the baby; and the dumb-ani- 
mal mother would think still less on the subject, 
yet she has the same experience as the human 
mother. The animal mother in a state of Nature 
needs no light on the subject; the primitive 
human mother needed no help of a physician, 

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Messages to Mothers 



nor of a baby-food factory. The primitive 
woman, simple, poor and illiterate, is not yet ex- 
tinct. She has preserved her kind and may still 
be found in great numbers in localities and 
among peoples not yet reached by the good in- 
fluence of science and art and the evil influence 
of book learning that is not science. 

Now at the weaning time in the case of any 
mother, human or otherwise, excepting the one 
that is artificialized and under the dominant 
spell of unscientific learning, the baby will 
gradually, readily, easily and eagerly adopt the 
diet of its mother, and at the same decreasing 
rate of consumption will it taper off on milk, of 
which the natural supply will also decrease at the 
same rate. It is not merely a rule without ex- 
ception, it is a law of Nature that the baby 
adopts the diet of its mother when it stops milk. 
Simple as this is, universally and intuitively 
executed as this law is by the illiterate mothers, 
the educated woman wants to be informed 
definitely what specific foods she may give the 
baby. 

Limiting her selections to within the range of 
such materials as are human foods naturally, 
fresh or in a good state of preservation, the 
mother may give the baby anything and every- 
thing it wants and all it wants. To find out 
what a baby wants, we would naturally begin 

76 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

with the most " repeatable" foods, those that en- 
ter oftenest into the diet of any race, especially 
in climates like ours. Accordingly we try beef, 
rice and potatoes to begin with. To ask a baby 
if it wants a particular food, put the food to its 
lips; if it wants food at all, it will first taste 
what is offered; if the baby does not want the 
food, it will turn its head away; if it does want 
the food, it will grab it and may take much 
more then and there. It is extremely unlikely 
that the baby will refuse scraped beef, or rice or 
potato. Further tests are very likely to prove 
that the baby is an omnivorous animal. 

The subconscious mind is sometimes alluded 
to as nature, " nature of the animal." We believe 
this little nature of the animal is a part and 
product of great Nature and that the small 
nature is consistent with great Nature, and that 
whatever the nature of the animal accepts from 
the Nature of Mother Earth will be strictly 
proper in all respects of quantity and quality, 
if only the food be in the same simple state in 
which great Nature produced it and not artifi- 
cially tampered with more than to cook it and 
reduce it to an eatable condition. The baby has 
an inerrant subconscious mind; it recognizes the 
complex food products of Nature, but it is not 
competent to take cognizance of complex artifi- 
cial mixtures and conglomerations. We will add 

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Messages to Mothers 



salt to its foods just as we do to ours, that is 
natural. We may give lean and fat meats mixed, 
nature supplies them so, and we may mix fats in 
small quantities with starches in large quanti- 
ties. The gastric intelligence demands these 
simple combinations, and experience proves that 
such demand is rightly interpreted. We may 
also mix sugar with some foods to that indefinite 
extent which is most easily defined by saying to 
suit the taste — the taste that is not involved in 
any bad habits. 

When it is found that the baby so heartily 
and eagerly eats potatoes, rice and pastes or 
gruels made from other cereals, as to convey the 
impression that it considers them very good, 
there can be no motive for trying to make them 
taste better or to make the baby like them bet- 
ter, and therefore no motive for adding sugar. 
We all need sugar and we get it in many foods, 
and the baby will get as much as the primitive 
baby got before sugar was presented to us in the 
artificial condition of isolated purity. We get 
sugar in so many foods naturally, and in such 
large quantities in some of them — dates, figs, 
raisins, prunes and all sweet fruits — that the 
artificially separated sugar does not seem to be 
necessary. While I cannot and do not wish to 
say anything against the moderate use of isolated 
sugar, I do not believe that it is at all necessary, 

78 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

and I can certainly point to examples showing 
that much harm has resulted to some people 
from the habitual, indiscriminate and too oft- 
repeated use of sugar. 

We will not mix milk or cream with the 
baby's food, now that it is in the process of ab- 
staining from milk; and we will not mix butter 
with its food, because that is an impure fat con- 
taining from one to two per cent of decompos- 
ing curd which makes the butter a stale fat. 
The gastric intelligence has a repugnance to 
stale things generally and can take cognizance 
of a degree of staleness so slight as to escape the 
scrutiny of the conscious mind as represented by 
the sense of taste. 

When weaning begins, water is to be the 
baby's drink, warm water in cool weather and 
cool water in warm weather; between these two 
it will not be hard to find which the baby pre- 
fers; that which it chooses will be best for it. 
If the baby does not want milk we soon find 
that out and it is quite certain then that it does 
not need milk; for, if it needed milk, it cer- 
tainly would want it and would take it. The 
baby will do its own choosing of foods from the 
various items that may be presented to it for 
selection. Even if we could influence it and pur- 
suade it to eat and drink according to our selec- 
tion, the baby's stomach would not always agree 

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Messages to Mothers 



on the choice of the mind of another. The 
stomach is governed entirely by the baby's own 
subconscious mind, and that is an intelligence 
that insists on minding its own business and is 
uncompromising in matters of food selection. 

The baby may have yet no conscious mind, 
may not be a knowing and reasoning creature, 
but it is possessed of an inerrant nature that is 
alive, awake and on duty and will make no mis- 
takes so long as it has only to deal with what is 
natural and not artificial. It will be useless to 
discuss the ideal character of milk as a food, if 
the baby does not want it, turns from it and re- 
fuses it when offered. The baby may by the al- 
ternative penalty of hunger and thirst be forced 
into taking milk, but the stomach cannot be 
forced into digesting it, nor even to supply the 
gastric juice to sterilize it and save it from putre- 
faction. Some wise infant stomachs will send 
the milk right up again, others retain it to spoil 
into sickening, irritating, poisonous and purga- 
tive decomposition products, that are as different 
from milk as a very bad egg is from a fresh 
one. 

To continue the enforced use of milk means 
to continue suffering from the illness caused by 
its decomposition in a stomach that can, of 
course, but will not digest it nor even sterilize it. 
That a child's stomach which has all along 

80 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

digested milk, now refuses it, but will digest 
beef, potatoes, rice and a dozen other foods, is 
proof of the presence of intelligence in the 
stomach's operations, and we have other evidence 
of the existence of this consistent intelligence 
which is simply a part of great Nature which it 
is not only useless but fatal to antagonize per- 
sistently. 

There die in California 160 children per 
month, under five years of age, from preventable 
diseases. In New York City just prior to 1896, 
when the population was very nearly the same 
as it was in California in 1900, there occurred an 
average of 258 deaths per month, of children 
under five years of age, or an average of 3,104 
per year for ten years, from diarrheal diseases 
alone. In New York City on January 17, 1907, 
William Mills said to the Woman's Municipal 
League: "While you are sitting here many 
mothers in this city are watching anxiously over 
babies who will die before tomorrow's dawn, for 
the infantile death rate in this city is 72 a day, 
or over 26,000 a year. To every 1,000 children 
born in this city in the past year there were 233 
deaths of infants." The Premier of England is 
reported to have said, December 29, 1906, that 
they could "hardly look the world in the face 
after recognizing that 120,000 babies died last 
year in England and Wales." In this the 

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Messages to Mothers 



Premier sees deterioration of the race, even the 
unfitting of the fittest. 

Of this child mortality the California State 
Board of Health estimated ( 1904 ) that 80 per 
cent is due to preventable diseases. It will, no 
doubt, be correct to assume that 80 per cent of 
the extraordinary child mortality that we read 
of elsewhere will also be due to preventable 
diseases. When diseases generally, or rather their 
causes, come to be understood, a still larger share 
of them will be found to belong to the preventa- 
ble division, and it will then be seen that it is 
far too low an estimate that reckons only 80 per 
cent of this child mortality as being due to pre- 
ventable diseases. 

These preventable diseases prove to be not 
diseases at all, but merely disorders of digestion. 
The patient would generally recover in twenty- 
four to forty-eight hours if the one or two errors 
of diet were corrected. Not all the victims of 
these digestive disorders die. To make a conser- 
vative guess, I should say that the number of 
new cases of illness each month is at least three 
times the number of deaths. The former in Cali- 
fornia would be 480. We may say there are 500 
new cases every month of children under five 
years of age who get sick from these functional 
disorders; 160 die, some recover; a very large per- 
centage do not recover, but continue to have 

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Ills of the Weaning' Period 

trouble with stomach or bowel, with resulting 
defects of development of body and mind in 
many cases. Many men and women will admit 
having had trouble of this kind ever since they 
can remember. So prevalent are these disorders 
that the well man or woman seems to be the ex- 
ception, and we are often reminded that we are a 
nation of dyspeptics. 

They are not much better off in any other en- 
lightened country where child life is influenced 
by the false light of unscientific and erroneous 
medical learning to the disparagement of experi- 
ence and the natural, inherited, inerrant, mater- 
nal knowledge of mothers. At the bottom of 
the trouble is the artificial element in the feed- 
ing of the baby. If we were deprived only of 
what we like, we would still enjoy good health, 
but to be deprived of what we need, is not com- 
patible with health, growth, development and 
usefulness. If a baby does not get what it needs, 
as called for by its wants, we cannot expect it to 
remain well and happy, and grow. 

The cause of these preventable ills of infants 
at the weaning time is that they are forced to 
continue what they no longer need nor want and 
are not given what they do need and want. The 
transition from milk to solid diet is too long de- 
ferred; it is one of those inconveniences that 
women are inclined to put off till tomorrow. 

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Messages to Mothers 



And then, having imbibed a few artificial ideas 
on the subject, mothers are afraid to make the 
transition, fearing that some evils and dangers 
are associated with this change of life in the 
baby's case. But, while this partial starvation 
for a month or two would not kill the baby, it 
prepares the way for ills that may kill it, or pre- 
pares the occasion for calling the doctor, in 
which event the conduct of the patient is gener- 
ally still farther removed from the safe and nat- 
ural to the dangerous and artificial way of doing 
things in such cases. 

In the current folk-lore of almost any com- 
munity there are conspicuous examples of chil- 
dren and adults who were dangerously ill, but 
who got well by getting what they wanted. To 
allow the baby freedom of selection means also 
freedom of rejection; it must therefore be 
allowed to stop milk absolutely if it wants to; 
which means that milk and cream must not be 
conglomerated with any other foods that the 
baby chooses. The stomach will not agree on the 
milk, no matter how small the quantity, even if 
it is fresh, or sterilized, and will either send it up 
or let it rot, and the spoiling mess will serve as 
cause of illness. Let us remember that the baby 
is natural, its needs and wants are natural and 
are therefore to be supplied by natural objects, 
not artificial. Nature makes complicated mix- 

84 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

tures for us, but they are good because Nature 
made them and we find that we have no gastric 
troubles on their account. But, if by the help 
of our own learned minds we make complicated 
mixtures and conglomerations for our stomachs, 
they will be artificial. Experience teaches that 
many people have much trouble with artificial 
conglomerations. 

The one great mistake that will account for 
these infantile digestive disorders that kill so 
many thousands of babies annually in the so- 
called civilized countries only, is the persistence 
of milk in the diet of children long after the 
subconscious mind has resolved to quit it. Not 
only is milk used daily, but several times daily; 
not only as the child's drink, but as a constituent 
of every mess of food that is conglomerated for 
it. That many children keep well and subsist 
partly on milk, simply proves that milk is proper 
for them, or that they are keeping well in spite 
of milk. But we are considering the multitude 
of cases in which it is not right, in which we do 
not succeed with the oft-repeated use of milk 
after their mother's natural supply for them has 
ceased and should be interpreted as meaning 
that the baby should then stop milk also. 

Instead of stopping the use of milk, as the 
subconscious mind wishes to, as great Nature de- 
signed and arranged it should, we resort to the 

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Messages to Mothers 



artificial contrivance known as the dairy. We 
talk of milk being an ideally perfect food, but 
that is true only within the limits of the nursing 
period. Milk ceases to be a perfect food when 
the baby refuses it and its stomach refuses to 
digest it. The very idea of killing a calf to get 
its mother's milk is repugnant to us, and this 
repugnance is proof enough that the unnatural 
procedure is wrong however we engage our rea- 
son to reconcile us to the practice. I have abso- 
lute confidence in the subconscious intelligence 
of the small boy who felt such a repugnance to 
milk that he could not be induced to take any 
after his mother had on her doctor's advice 
taken him to the country for the sake of getting 
fresh milk for him. He saw the source of it, and 
naturally, spontaneously and uncompromisingly 
decided against milk as an article of diet for him. 
But supposing we consent to the dairy so long 
as its repugnant features are beyond our imme- 
diate view, the unnatural contrivance embraces 
the still further unnatural detail of getting milk 
from an animal in one part of the country and 
delivering it to another animal in another part 
of the country. The distance varies from a few 
yards to hundreds of miles; the time varies 
from a few minutes to twelve or more hours. 
How unnatural this is may be more easily seen 
or imagined than explained. Milk is a very un- 

86 



Ills of the Weaning' Period 

stable combination, an exceedingly perishable 
stuff, and after the long time in transit, the ex- 
posure to air as it is trundled hastily along on 
wagon, on train and again on wagon, the ever 
and abundantly present microbian life of the 
barnyard and the city, and along the line be- 
tween, is thoroughly rubbed, beaten and churned 
into the milk. In the natural way of taking it, 
milk is not exposed to air or to microbian life at 
all. 

There is in a city no such thing as fresh milk 
from a dairy. It may seem good to the taste, 
may pass the health-office test, but it is a stale 
article, and the fine gastric intelligence of your 
bright little Jack McCormicks is not going to be 
fooled by it many times. We are informed that 
the milk can be got to destination in a perfectly 
good state of preservation, that the chemist has 
supplied the means; but it is not so. Time and 
transit have changed the milk; the reasoning 
mind may not see it, but again it will not fool 
the stomach of your highly sensitive baby who 
in these times is likely to be all the worse for 
having descended through several highly artifi- 
cialized generations. Let us suppose that the 
milk during transportation does remain in statu 
quo under the influence of a substance that is 
paralyzing to microbian life. That substance is 
not a food, but it is not an inert substance either, 

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Messages to Mothers 



else it would be ineffective against the microbe. 
The amount of it that one gets in his daily al- 
lowance of milk is harmlessly small, we are 
told. We may actually take this stuff in these 
small quantities, try it and demonstrate the 
harmless character of it. And yet, the alleged 
demonstrated harmless character of any stuff of 
this class put to such use is not a fact. I do not 
doubt that interested parties mean well, and it 
may be admitted that this stuff in these small 
quantities is harmless in ninety-nine cases in a 
hundred; but if it is bad for one in a hundred 
it is bad for the community, and the aggregate 
evil to the State must be great. These preserva- 
tive stuffs may by actual single test prove to be 
harmless to a thousand people and yet not bear 
repeated use several times daily without cumu- 
lative harm, resulting in illness which is easily 
named, but for which no cause is intelligibly 
assigned. 

The stony seeds of cherries and of plums 
never hurt anybody when swallowed. A small 
boy swallowed a silver quarter; his mother 
rushed him to the doctor, related the fact and 
asked the doctor if it would pass. The doctor 
replied that if it was good it would pass. While 
stomachs, especially those of small boys, too 
easily accept large seeds and small coins, some 
people cannot force themselves to swallow a pill. 

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Ills of the Weaning- Period 

So it appears that even the gullet possesses some 
discriminating intelligence. There are other ex- 
amples to that effect, and we should think it 
would and should possess such discriminating in- 
telligence, for, if the stomach objects to a thing, 
it would seem proper to stop it at the point 
where it begins to start on its way there. 

I suppose it is generally known what happens 
to many of us when a fly gets into our stomachs. 
We are aware of a strong feeling of repugnance 
to flies. That a dead, inert and harmless fly gets 
into the stomach is purely accidental and against 
such precautions as to make the event entirely 
unsuspected, and, when the circumstances a 
minute or so later compel us to suspect such a 
thing, it is hard to believe that it could have 
happened. But it has happened and just often 
enough to furnish proof and confirmation of 
proof that the stomach can, and that some 
stomachs always, have a very strong repugnance 
to flies, and that, although the person does not 
know a fly has got into his stomach, the stomach 
does know it, takes cognizance of its presence, 
stops its normal procedures, calls to its aid all the 
many muscles employed in emesis and sends up 
everything in the stomach just to get the fly up. 
This is not a pleasant detail of our study, but it 
is of great utilitarian interest. Along with simi- 
lar experiences involving other objects, it proves 

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the existence of a gastric intelligence that has 
dislikes as well as likes, that can refuse as well as 
choose, that can order a strike and refuse to 
handle the usual material when an objectionable 
item, however small and harmless in itself, is 
present. 

You can fool the erring conscious mind but 
you cannot fool the unerring subconscious mind 
of which the gastric intelligence is the faculty 
that attends to selection and digestion of foods. 
You can fool the palate with materials that are 
not natural foods, but you cannot fool the 
stomach, and, if in addition to the dyspeptic 
reader's own experience further proof were 
needed, enough other examples to that effect 
could be supplied. Nor do we fool the subcon- 
scious intelligence with drugs for keeping milk 
sweet and for preserving fruits, vegetables, meats, 
beverages and for coloring butter. The stomach 
may not take cognizance, so far as one may 
know, of the first few times that such unnatural 
things enter it, but many stomachs will not en- 
dure repetition of the trick. 

As an example of artificially modified food 
that is capable of disabling an army more than 
the powder and lead of the enemy, we may con- 
sider beef from which an extract has been taken. 
An advertisement actually tells us that the ex- 
tract is pleasant to the taste. No doubt about 

90 



Ills of the Weaning' Period 

that, but the meat is deprived of its pleasant 
taste and anybody can easily detect the fraud. 
Soldiers and other mastered men will obediently 
eat it in response to orders, but their stomachs do 
not recognize and do not submit to the superior 
authority of the commissary department, which 
does not yet know that, whereas each one has 
mind of his own and must mind his own busi- 
ness, the mind of one, the superior, cannot govern 
the bodily functions of another, the inferior. If 
the meat of an army be for weeks limited ex- 
clusively to such as will have no other fault than 
that it is robbed of such constituents as the ex- 
tracted juice will carry away, then the army will 
meet as bad a fate as its worst enemy could wish. 
Such meat is not " repeatable " ; the men do not 
want it, do not like it, and their stomachs do not 
agree on its selection and will not digest it. 

Under the influence of learning, that is not 
science, there is and has been a general disregard 
of the authority of the subconscious mind in 
matters of its own concern. Patients have been 
and are given medicines that they do not want 
and are denied foods that they do want. That is 
the way patients are killed. Nearly all of the 
prostrated dysentery patients of the Spanish- 
American war in the Philippines were killed 
that way. Faults of the rations made them sick 
and the treatment killed them. The merit of the 

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so-called Christian Science method of treating 
the sick consists in allowing the subconscious 
mind to have its own way in its own affairs. 
Medicines and spoon victuals not wanted are not 
taken; the food, the rest and the quiet consola- 
tion that are wanted are received. The source of 
harm is eliminated, power is supplied by the 
foods or the fat of the patient, and with it the 
subconscious mind of the patient, and nothing else 
performs the miracle of restoration. The name 
is new but not the method, which is the same as 
has always prevailed among the illiterate poor 
who look upon a doctor as a luxury only for the 
rich. 

Unsound brain in unsound body is the way an 
ancient saying might read. Conscious mind is 
incapacitated by illness which involves the brain 
with the body in general. Even a sick doctor 
calls in a physician; just as well, since conscious 
mind has no business with the physical disorder. 
But the subconscious mind is not affected by the 
illness, and is just as competent as ever, and it is 
its function to direct the disordered affairs of the 
body and accomplish the restoration. 

Neither the mother nor the doctor can choose 
for and dictate what the child is to eat. The 
child is a perfectly equipped organism with per- 
fected mind of its own, even if it be subcon- 
scious, so constituted that it can and must mind 

92 



Ills of the Weaning" Period 

its own business of its own bodily functions of 
selection, rejection, etc. It is therefore extremely 
foolish and fatally wrong to thousands and ruin- 
ous to tens of thousands of babies annually to 
interfere with their own function of rejecting 
milk and accepting other foods when they want 
to do so. To partially starve the baby, by refus- 
ing it what it wants, is the lesser evil. The one 
great and fatal error is to insist on continuing 
milk as a drink and as an adjunct to nearly 
everything it eats, when the indications clearly 
show that the baby does not want milk in any 
way whatever. Many children are found to be 
taking milk, as such and as a constituent of 
mixtures, as a matter of obedience, — the parents 
imposing the same because they ought to, ac- 
cording to the consensus of opinion that is 
most learned and therefore most entitled to re- 
spect. The children thus acquire the habit of 
taking what is given, not calling for what they 
want, having found that useless. 

The child's stomach in many such cases not 
only refuses to digest the milk or the mixture, 
but even refuses to supply the gastric juice to 
sterilize it and save it from spoiling. Thus we 
have digestive disorder, illness of many, deaths 
of some. And if death does not occur till 
nearly five years of age, it is nevertheless due 
to the disorder that will almost certainly be 

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found to have had its inception at the wean- 
ing time. 

We are not concerned with the whole popula- 
tion; we are interested in the health of the 
babies who obje6l to the arbitrary forcing of 
milk upon them. These make up a very large 
sum in the aggregate, and those that suffer and 
die are of much concern to all the rest of the 
community. The great number of deaths, the 
still greater number of chronically dyspeptic 
survivors, mean danger to young children, and no 
one knows where the selections of the grim 
Reaper will fall next. That the harvest of disease 
and death is preventable, or even reducible, 
makes the matter worth while as an object of 
study and action and is our motive for doing so 
and our apology for agitation. 

It is a law of all mammal nature that at the 
weaning time the use of milk ceases. The en- 
lightened human mother arbitrarily makes an 
exception and violates that law with the result 
that many die and a much larger number are 
poisoned into a state of ill health, ill nature and 
incompetence, the evil of all which radiates to 
and affects society about them. 

The Health Authorities blame not the dairy 
itself, but the unclean and fraudulent methods of 
it, for all the ills and deaths associated with the 
consumption of milk. Those authorities want 

94 



Ills of the Weaning: Period 

the legislative bodies to prescribe more law for 
the regulation of dairies. The Rockefeller In- 
stitute of Medical Research believes these ills 
and deaths are due to a microbe and is looking 
for it; but now, 1908, in the sixth year of its 
search, has not yet found the right one. 

In the home and presence of the patient will 
be seen the erroneous feeding that I have writ- 
ten of, the plainly evident repugnance to milk 
which the patient is nevertheless forced to take. 
However fresh, clean and pure the milk may be, 
the repugnance is there just the same. The item 
of filth being eliminated, the illness still persists. 
It will also be seen in the home that the child will 
recover if milk is eliminated absolutely from its 
diet, proving that milk is the cause. The stomach 
does not digest what it does not want. These 
same facts must, of course, exclude the microbe 
as the cause of the illness. If such a fatal 
microbe were colonized in the digestive appa- 
ratus of the child, it would be absurd to suppose 
that it could be extinguished by simply elimi- 
nating milk. 

The rather artificial health authorities are not 
able to transmute their legislative ideas into 
action; so much the better for the still some- 
what natural common people; and the Rocke- 
feller Institute of Medical Research is not mak- 
ing any progress in this line either, so far as the 

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public is aware. What we offer in this important 
matter of Jack McCormick's Disease, is by this 
time understood, and we want it understood that 
our method of prevention and cure is a great 
success and consists only in eliminating what is 
artificial and restoring what is natural in baby 
feeding. 

In China and Japan the baby gets no milk 
after weaning. In these countries there is no ex- 
traordinary infant mortality. In China, milk 
from a dairy is popularly believed to be poison- 
ous, and it is not considered safe to use it. When 
the Chinese venture to use it at all, it is only 
during cold weather. Of course, I agree that 
their belief is thoroughly well founded. How 
much more experience do we need to teach us 
the same lesson? Japanese children, as seen out- 
of-doors in Japan, appear physically and morally 
better and happier than the children of any 
otherwise civilized country in the world. When 
the Japanese baby is weaned it eats what its par- 
ents eat, so far as such things can be reduced to 
an eatable condition for a baby. The Chinese 
and Japanese have no regular dairies and there- 
fore no regular delivery of milk. But they are 
likely to follow bad examples and try the dairy. 
Already in Japan an occasional family has its 
cow, and imported condensed milk can be bought 
in the more important towns. In their innocence 

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Ills of the Weaning" Period 

and with faith in the white man, they employ 
milk, when obtainable, as an article of diet in 
cases of sickness. Of course, many patients both 
here and there recover in spite of milk, but milk 
also kills many an adult as well as tens of thou- 
sands of children. In comparison with the dairy, 
the brewery and the distillery are very innocent 
institutions. The Japanese are teaching us by 
example how to feed armies. They also prove by 
example that I am right in placing milk out of 
season and mortality out of season in the rela- 
tion of cause and effect. 

I am supposed to have been writing about the 
preventable ills of the weaning period. The 
group of ills consists primarily of a simple 
digestive disorder with various ills of various 
names that depend on, or result from, the initial 
digestive disorder. The most utilitarian view of 
the group is to regard it as a unit, for the reason 
that its cause is a unit; namely, the refusal of 
the digestive apparatus to digest what the sub- 
conscious mind does not agree on choosing: 
milk after weaning, all the worse after having 
been transported a few hundred miles. Of these 
ills themselves I have said nothing and mean to 
say nothing more. Beyond the cause, the study 
of this polynonimous group of ills, with its im- 
possible classification, has never been and never 
can be of any utility. The enormous death rates, 

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in our country in general and in our cities in 
particular, of children under five years of age, 
from confessedly preventable diseases, prove the 
ignorance of the learned ones and the failure of 
the prevailing methods of treatment and the 
learning upon which they are based. These death 
rates also prove the dangerous character of the 
authoritative literature that instructs physicians 
to insist on over-confident mothers giving their 
children milk against their children's will five 
times daily into the third year of their age and 
to continue the use of milk still far beyond that 
age. The luck of the illiterate proves the wis- 
dom and the superiority of the subconscious 
mind in the affair of food selection in particular 
and in maternal affairs in general. 

The ills that I am writing of and saying so 
little about are at least well known if not un- 
derstood. The ills themselves do not need to be 
understood for any utilitarian reason. They do 
not need to be treated; they are results and 
there is no utility in the treatment of results so 
long as causes are allowed to remain in constant 
operation. For neglecting these results, which 
everywhere else receives so much useless attention 
and fallacious treatment, the reason is that they 
are self-limited and self-curable disorders; in 
other words, the subconscious mind of the patient 
performs the cure, if only the conscious mind of 

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Ills of the Weaning' Period 

the dodlor, the parent or guardian, will cease to 
maintain the cause. The cause is the only thing 
that need concern us and is our sole object of at- 
tention. The cure is to be left to the patient's 
subconscious mind — the nature of the animal — 
which is part of, and consistent with, great Nature 
and just as much to be trusted. The only im- 
portant question concerning these ills is that of 
their cause. I have supplied the answer and 
shaped it into the form of instruction with 
enough varied repetition to produce, as I believe, 
an impression. 

The baby is unsophisticated and is persistently 
true to Nature, and is not easily diverted to the 
artificial ways of existence and subsistence that 
are so fatal to the health and life of the Nation. 
When it becomes plainly apparent that the baby 
refuses milk, let us refrain from trying modifi- 
cations of milk, or other sources or brands; let 
it be understood that the baby does not want 
any milk whatever. It must have water to drink, 
and milk and cream must now be excluded ab- 
solutely from all its foods. The baby will then 
need and therefore want and like such natural 
foods, fresh or in a good state of preservation, as 
its parents eat, in a simple and unconglomerated 
state, just as in the case of any other young 
mammal. Selection of foods for a baby ceases 
to be a problem, or source of trouble or anxiety, 

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Messages to Mothers 



when the baby is allowed to attend to it him- 
self. Let the mother offer the baby at meal 
times and at other times such as there is. The 
baby, if it wants anything, will taste everything 
and will turn back or away from what it does 
not want, and will eagerly grab what it does 
want. The baby's subconscious mind can be ab- 
solutely trusted to make no mistake as to quality 
or quantity so long as what is offered is not af- 
fected artificially by conglomeration, or any 
other unnatural modification except cooking. 
The subconscious mind, however, cannot be relied 
on to judge artificial conglomerations and modi- 
fications of foods. The baby may accept them 
and trouble may and often does arise from their 
ingestion ; if not from a first, second or third 
taking, trouble is extremely likely to arise after 
a more or less prolonged repetition of the more 
or less artificially modified food. 

The cure of these preventable ills, that begin 
at or soon after the weaning period, must have 
already become plainly apparent; but repetition 
is an essential element of instruction and con- 
stitutes the one difference between telling a thing 
and teaching it. I am not to be understood as 
encouraging the domestic treatment of real 
disease, nor the domestic employment of drugs; 
but these preventable ills are not real diseases, 
they are only digestive disorders in which the 

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Ills of the Weaning- Period 

only danger to life arises from faults in care and 
treatment, and much more so under professional 
direction than under the intuitive supervision of 
the natural, unsophisticated mother. No drugs 
are involved, and the case and management of 
the child, even though sick from such disorder, 
remain properly and naturally within the 
mother's natural province, and should remain 
there so long as the medical profession, with its 
prevailing unnatural and fallacious methods, 
continues to make such a bad record of fatal re- 
sults of treatment. 

Here in my neighborhood was an example of 
spontaneous recovery of a baby with only the 
ministrations of its mother after two physicians 
had abandoned it as having no hope of recovery. 
Both the doctors and the mother expected it to 
die. The emergency developed the heroine; the 
mother courageously let the baby alone to die in 
peace, attending only to the simple, natural de- 
tails of care for the baby's comfort. The baby 
quickly grew better. The mother relying now 
only on her inerrant maternal wisdom — the ma- 
ternal subconscious mind — did only what that 
wisdom, that intelligence, suggested; all which 
may be called " nothing," but it was just the 
perfectly natural and simple way of caring for 
a sick baby with only digestive disorder and no 
real disease. The baby was let alone and other- 

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Messages to Mothers 



wise given what it seemed to want and need, and 
though it would have died under the "most ad- 
vanced" method of treatment, it got well, just 
as many an educated white mother's baby in our 
Southern States has got well under the perfectly 
natural ministrations of a genuine, unsophisti- 
cated, black "mammy.'* 

Interested parties find on inquiry that what a 
mother has done, in such a case of recovery, con- 
sisted of letting the child alone and doing noth- 
ing. In the conduct of such a case the illiterate 
mother succeeds better than the learned mother; 
but the illiterate mother knows nothing of the 
sciences involved in the case of her sick baby. 
Knowing nothing, how could she make any rea- 
sonably intelligent and consistent procedure? The 
study of the human animal and its liabilities is 
practically infinite, and the little we know of the 
subject adds little good and, by misunderstand- 
ing and misappropriation, much danger to our 
qualification for conducting the case of a patient. 
The illiterate mother well knows the one great 
fundamental fact under the circumstances of the 
bedside of the patient; that is the fact that she 
knows nothing and can therefore only and con- 
sistently do nothing. But a great restoration 
takes place and we call it a spontaneous recovery. 
The recovery is, however, not spontaneous; a 
real, living and knowing agency conducts the 

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Ills of the Weaning" Period 

restoration of order out of disorder and employs 
power and material for the purpose. That 
knowing agency is the subconscious mind of the 
patient, even if it is a baby. The material was 
got, while it was not eating, from its own tissues; 
the power was got from its own stored fuel. The 
child diminished in weight while the restoration 
took place; the loss of weight represented the 
fuel material that was decomposed to supply the 
power necessary for the restoration. 

There must be a little intelligence in the little 
caterpillar that performs the wonderful change 
of organization into that of the butterfly with- 
out the aid of any external intelligence. Why 
should we, then, have any trouble in believing 
that the subconscious mind can perform the 
restoration of order out of disorder? And why 
should we not trust it to do so without interfer- 
ence? It is only the people that are affected with 
learning, and with a disposition to misappro- 
priate it, that do not so trust in this little detail 
of Nature to mind its own business. It may not 
be correct to say it is intelligence that conducts 
these changes, but the principle is just the same 
whatever we call it. We may just as well call it 
a form of energy, correlated with all other forms 
of energy. I believe that would be correct; it is 
easier to see that a form of energy could trans- 
form an egg into a bird, than it is to see that an 

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egg has intelligence to conduct the organization. 
Then, also, energy would be the fitter word to 
apply to the case of the organization of a bud or 
a flower. In the case of the subconscious mind, 
however, I would adhere to the word and the 
idea of intelligence, admitting that intelligence 
may be really a form of energy, and that edu- 
cation simply improves the instrumentalities 
through which this energy operates. 

No educated conscious mind of a patient him- 
self, or of a physician, is in any sense a com- 
petitor of the subconscious mind of the patien* 
in the matter of his restoration to that physical 
integrity called health. Therefore we should let 
the patient alone to be governed by his feelings. 
That is the patient's wish, unless he is unduly 
influenced by learning of his own. He has sub- 
conscious mind of his own which will insist on at- 
tending to all those affairs of the body that are 
beyond his ken and to the restoration of order 
within him. Physical disorder is utterly beyond 
the comprehension of the most learned conscious 
mind, whether of the patient or the physician. 
We are to do nothing but supply what the sub- 
conscious mind calls for, we attend only to the 
environment. The illiterate woman is so great a 
success as a mother that she and her ways might 
well constitute one of the most utilitarian and 
vitally important nature studies for the family 

104 



Ills of the Weaning' Period 

physician whose duty it must often be to turn 
learned women from the artificial to the natural 
point of view and adlion in maternal affairs. 
And I suggest that the most natural and there- 
fore the best objects of such study would be 
found among the thrifty poor outside of the 
United States of America, and I think no- 
where could better examples be found than in 
Japan. 

We are not looking for trouble in the case of 
the child who is happy. If it is not happy we 
are very willing and anxious to remove the cause 
of its unhappiness and, if practicable, should do 
so at once, for it is bad policy, from the char- 
acter development point of view, to allow an 
unhappy state of mind to persist any longer than 
we can cut it short by supplying natural demands 
in regard to food, drink, comfort and toys or 
other means of occupation. 

If the child's trouble amounts to more than a 
mere unhappiness, if it amounts to real distress 
and if its tongue is much coated and the color of 
the tongue is very different from the normal pale 
red, then we know the child is not well. The 
fact of its distress prompts us to look for causes. 
We first investigate as to the condition of the 
bowel. If the abdomen is tense, tight as a drum, 
unloading of the rectum has been neglected and 
needs to be attended to at once. This can gen- 

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Messages to Mothers 



erally be done successfully in two minutes by 
injecting into the redlum a very little common 
salt solution, brine. Whether the brine is a little 
stronger or weaker, warm or cold, makes little 
difference; whether the quantity is a teaspoon- 
ful or a quarter-teaspoonful makes little differ- 
ence. A little brine put just inside of the re6lum 
is almost certain to cause an unloading and the 
expulsion of much gas inside of two minutes. 
In a recently neglected case where the material 
is unduly hard, this injection may have to be re- 
peated at intervals of half an hour, more or less. 
The injection should be made with an eighth- 
ounce hard rubber syringe with straight tip, and 
the tip should be lubricated for use. 

Instead of brine, glycerin will do even better; 
a half-teaspoonful will be plenty and a quarter- 
teaspoonful will be enough and just as effective 
as if a whole teaspoonful were used. For a baby 
five drops will be plenty. The instrument only 
holds a teaspoonful. In using glycerin the in- 
strument need not be lubricated by other 
material. One slight difficulty with glycerin is 
that the caliber of the nozzle of the instrument 
is too small to admit of the easy flow of glycerin, 
which is of a syrupy consistence, especially when 
fresh and cold. Such injections are very success- 
ful; the blockade is, with rare exceptions, only 
in the redlum, and purgative medicines adting all 

106 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

along the digestive tra6l are unnecessary as well 
as unnatural and possibly harmful. 

The constipation, the hard condition of the 
material in the bowel, is a result, and, after all, 
this aiding of the bowel by local lubrication and 
stimulation is merely treating a result and car- 
ing for an emergency. At the age of twelve 
months and for a year or two later, a child ought 
to have the rectum unloaded twice daily. If that 
does not occur naturally, it will be easy to make 
it occur by the aid of a little brine or glycerin 
as explained. A very convenient thing to know 
in this connection is, that young children can 
easily and always be made to unload the rectum 
early in the forenoon when it is proposed to take 
them out for the day, on a journey or picnic or 
visit, and they will then cause their mother no 
anxiety on this matter during the day away from 
home. 

To cure constipation when it seems to be the 
chief trouble the child has, let its milk be 
stopped absolutely; let milk, cream and butter 
be eliminated from the child's diet. It has passed 
the weaning stage and does not need milk. Even 
if it likes milk, the liking is acquired from the 
habitual use of milk, its selection proceeds from 
the conscious mind; the want of it is based on 
the like of it and not on the felt need of it. 
The gastric intelligence does not call for milk 

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Messages to Mothers 



and does not agree on its selection by the con- 
scious mind. The stomach refuses to digest it 
and we have then a real digestive disorder with 
constipation and some slight mental and physi- 
cal distress as the results. When the bowel acts 
again unaided and this abstinence has been main- 
tained some weeks, butter may be restored to the 
child's diet, never to be used oftener than twice 
daily, because that is the limit of the " repeata- 
bility " of butter as established by generations of 
experience now and long ago formulated into the 
European family custom of having butter on the 
table only twice daily. If constipation again fol- 
lows when butter is resumed, then butter must 
be stopped, and it will not be worth while to try 
butter again for months. Any other commonly 
used fat may be substituted for butter if neces- 
sary or desirable. Pure olive oil is better and 
cleaner than butter and, so far as I can learn, 
people invariably like it on bread. Children are 
prejudiced by the appearance of the olive oil 
bottle, but they easily follow example when older 
members of the family use it first and express 
signs of being pleased with it. 

Milk and cream should not, alone nor mixed 
with other foods, be given such child again un- 
less it wants them, and not even then unless it 
can use them without constipation as a result. 
When milk and cream are to be excluded, it is 

108 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

generally necessary to explain and repeat that 
not a drop of these materials is to be allowed in 
the diet of the patient. By concealing milk, 
cream or anything the stomach does not want, 
we may fool the conscious mind as represented 
by sight, smell and taste, but we do not fool the 
subconscious mind as represented by the gastric 
intelligence. 

Here in my neighborhood, for example, was a 
baby, six months and twenty days old, that had 
been and still was very sick, and under treatment 
was getting no better. An operation was con- 
sidered, decided on and appointments for that 
purpose were about to be made. A trifling event 
served as cause of change in the conduct of the 
case. The baby was now let alone. It accepted 
warm water in plenty and frequently. It refused 
all offers of milk and other foods until forty-five 
hours had elapsed; but during this time grew 
rapidly better, rested and slept better, and the 
appearance of distress gradually vanished from 
its face and gave place to an appearance of com- 
fort and well-being. At the end of forty-five 
hours, from the moment that it was let alone, it 
tasted and accepted food, a teaspoonful, and a 
half-teaspoonful more at intervals of about two 
hours during the day and at longer intervals 
during the night. At the end of six and a half 
days from the beginning of this method of treat- 

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ment, this baby began to eat very heartily, and, 
though not yet seven months old, ate a some- 
what surprising quantity of stewed tomatoes one 
evening and on the following morning again ate 
heartily of plain stewed tomatoes. 

This baby was now well, just seven days after 
it very narrowly escaped an operation. It proved 
to be a success as an omnivorous animal, for it 
ate of nearly all the foods that its parents ate, so 
far as these were fresh or in a good state of 
preservation and could be reduced to a pulp. 
Beef, potatoes and cereals were, of course, an im- 
portant share of its diet. It had a decided prefer- 
ence for paste made of the Hawaiian taro root, 
but it does not follow that all babies must prefer 
taro, — in fa6l a neighboring baby did not fancy 
taro at all. All this time the aforesaid baby was 
refusing milk, but although it was getting along 
perfectly, its mother had not yet become recon- 
ciled to the necessity, propriety or justice of 
the baby being deprived, or depriving itself, of 
milk. Still hoping the baby could some way be 
induced to take it, she mixed milk with its taro 
paste one day after the baby had been thriving 
about two weeks. 

We cannot suppose this baby to have had any 
conscious knowledge of a starchy paste, whether 
taro or cereal, nor of milk or any other food- 
stuff. It could, however, by virtue of its con- 

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Ills of the Weaning" Period 

scious mind as represented by its sense of taste, 
select or reject either mush or milk, or both. 
Both mush and milk being natural foods, 
provided by Nature, would be consistent with the 
requirements of the nature of the animal. But 
the conscious mind, as represented by the sense 
of taste of this or any other baby of like age, 
was not competent to take cognizance of the ar- 
tificial mixture by which this mother attempted 
to smuggle milk into the stomach of this baby. 
The baby swallowed the mixture; its sense of 
taste, the "outside guard" of the stomach, was 
fooled. But even in such a young baby there is 
a gastric intelligence, a part or faculty of the 
fully developed subconscious mind. This gastric 
intelligence was not and would not be fooled. 
The baby's stomach sent the mixture right up 
again. This baby had by force of circumstances 
been weaned early, and early adopted the diet of 
its parents; then in about three months still far- 
ther followed the example of the rest of the 
family in particular and of the community in 
general by using milk regularly and, I am told, 
successfully. 

As the subconscious mind is practically iner- 
rant, does not make mistakes, it can afford to be 
stubborn and uncompromising. What it deter- 
mines on seems to be final. When a baby's stomach 
refuses to digest milk, or any mixture of which 

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Messages to Mothers 



it is a part, we may as well yield; not even to 
save its life will it digest milk or a mixture 
thereof. In spite of the spoiling mess that many 
a milk-fed baby after the weaning time is forced 
to carry daily, it may live a wretched life and 
make other lives wretched, or it may die as a re- 
sult of the irritating and poisonous character of 
the constantly present produces of putrefaction 
that result from the constantly present milk 
in its diet which it will not digest, nor even 
sterilize. 

Stewed tomatoes were not specified in the in- 
structions given to the mother in the case men- 
tioned, but they were included and were none 
the less safe for having been got from cans. The 
instructions were, to offer the baby any and all 
such ordinary foods as are in common use, fresh 
or in a good state of preservation, in their sim- 
plest, unmixed and unconglomerated states, re- 
duced by cooking and otherwise to conditions 
requiring no mastication. Many foodstuffs are 
offered and a few are chosen and these are 
enough. The mother simply offers, that is her 
business; the baby selects, that is its exclusive 
business, and it is perfectly well qualified to at- 
tend to it unaided. If the baby is hungry it will 
taste what is offered, and turn away if it does 
not want it, or it vigorously grabs the little 
spoonful if it wants it. In its selection it will 

112 



Ills of the Weaning- Period 

make no mistake so long as only the common 
" repeatable " foods are offered. 

This is common practice based on the common 
sense that is inherited and constitutional. Both 
are common among primitive and illiterate 
mothers and naturally experienced nurses, but 
they are rare among learned mothers and artifi- 
cially trained nurses and do not seem to have 
been considered worthy of space in the books 
upon which physicians depend for their learning 
on the subject. A learned woman wondered why 
common sense is so called when it is in fa<5l so 
rare. In a state of nature all young mammals 
adopt the foods of their mothers as gradually as 
their desire for milk and the milk supply de- 
crease. Selection is the young animal's own 
business, and it is not influenced in this matter 
by anything more than the mother's example, 
and even that does not appear to be necessary. 
Under domestication, young animals kept apart 
from their mothers, as calves in separate enclo- 
sures, make no mistakes in selection. Our babies, 
when we give them the opportunities, will dis- 
play the same inerrant faculty for selection as 
any other young mammal. 

The subconscious mind does not, we have good 
reasons for believing, share in the illness of the 
patient, so that even in illness its selections and 
rejections are just as correct as in health and just 

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Messages to Mothers 



as much to be trusted. A want of an animal in 
a state of nature, and such the unsophisticated 
baby or child is, is a perfectly natural phenome- 
non, and is therefore never to be interpreted as 
calling for anything that is unnatural, made so 
by artificial modification. There is no natural 
provision of milk for a baby after weaning and 
the cessation of its mother's supply. The dairy 
is an artificial contrivance, a repugnant institu- 
tion, an object of endless complaint and a source 
of more evil than the distillery and the brewery 
combined. 

To dispense with the dairy absolutely would 
eliminate almost entirely the ills peculiar to the 
weaning period and so far reduce infant mor- 
tality as to make the periods of infancy and 
childhood no more dangerous to life than any 
other time of life. If there is any doubt about 
this, we have only to point to the Japanese 
mother in general and to the generally excellent 
health, vigor and cheerful good temper of the 
Japanese children, who get no milk beyond the 
weaning time and who are in no greater danger 
of disease and death during infancy than at any 
other time of life. 

To kill a mature animal for its meat and other 
products of utility is perfectly right, natural, 
necessary and not cruel; but to kill a young 
calf for the sake of getting its mother's milk, is 

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Ills of the Weaning' Period 

an unnatural and unnecessary act of cruelty to 
the cow. The milk of the distressed cow goes to 
feed babies. The subtle fault of this milk is 
known to physicians and mothers, but the milk 
inspector cannot detect it. 

An item of evidence against young calf kill- 
ing is the fact that, whereas everybody can eat 
beef more and oftener than any other meat, a 
great many people cannot succeed in eating veal. 
The conscious mind may choose veal, or consent 
to eating it when placed before the person, but 
in many cases the stomach does not agree on the 
choice. It would be absurd to say that veal is 
more difficult of digestion than beef. The sub- 
conscious mind, the gastric intelligence, shares in 
the conscious mind's repugnance to the idea of 
killing the innocent and immature animal which 
should rather be raised to maturity and more 
economically serve more useful purposes. The 
stomach can, of course, but refuses to digest veal 
in these cases and the person is made to suffer a 
penalty for patronizing the unnatural institution 
of calf killing. 



115 



Chapter VI 

Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

The Merits of the Natural and the 
Evils of the Artificial 

BEFORE children are more than a very 
few years old, they will feel an impor- 
| tant special need which will move them 
to express an urgent want that should, 
in the light of what has been said, be easily 
understood and provided for. That this want is 
generally misunderstood and not rightly provided 
for, is my reason for this further explanation. 
This demand of the subconscious mind is now 
generally misinterpreted and a counterfeit is 
given to the child instead of the real, natural 
obje6l that the nature of the animal calls for. 
The mistake, early begun, encouraged by trades- 
people and consented to by parents, is continued 
through life, and therefore at all times of life we 
find people liberally patronizing the candy shops 
trying to satisfy their natural demand for sugar 
by artificial conglomerations called candies. 
In regard to this object, sugar, the subconscious 
mind's call is urgent and persistent, and sugar is 
one of the most pressing needs of the body. I 
will show that serious ills are due to lack of 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

sugar in the patient's diet and that such ills 
promptly subside when sugar is supplied. I will 
also show that the gastric intelligence in some 
cases refuses sugar from the bowl, or at any rate 
objects to it in such a way that the patient suffers 
for taking it, and the cases are more numerous 
in which the patient suffers for eating candies. 
The fault in the first place lies in the misin- 
terpretation of the demand. The primitive 
family had no sugar in a bowl nor any candies. 
Our longings differ from those of the primitive 
man, if at all, only in degree but not in kind. 
He found foods with varying amounts of sugar, 
some of them as rich in sugar and as sweet as 
candy itself. He had recourse to these just as we 
can have. The gastric intelligence agrees on the 
choice of sweet fruits to the extent that we need 
them and we actually find that those who suffer 
for eating sugar, or candies, or sweet pastries, do 
not suffer when they eat sweet fruits to the ex- 
tent of their needs. It is a proper cause of com- 
plaint against parents generally, that they fail 
to supply children with sweet fruits and that 
they erroneously supply the artificial sweets in- 
stead, or permit children to supply themselves. 
We actually find that children who get what 
sweet fruits they need will not care for candy; 
the candy-shop has but slight temptation for 
them. In the child who gets not enough sweet 

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Messages to Mothers 



fruits and is denied sugar and candies, we can 
demonstrate defects of digestion and of physical 
maintenance and growth, and we can show by 
his conduct and his work that the child is 
mentally and morally defective. 

It never happens that we acquire digestive dis- 
orders from ingesting what we need, if the thing 
be fresh or in a good state of preservation. 
Whatever we need we will also want and like. 
The natural and only safe basis of the want is 
the need. But we want candy because we like it, 
and on this improper motive we erroneously 
seledl candy as the object of our need of sugar 
as Nature has supplied it in sweet fruits. Quite 
a list of things erroneously go into the mouth 
on the mere basis of liking them, and the liking 
is acquired and is a matter of unnatural habit. 
Some such things are: artificial conglomerations 
of real foods, as, for examples, excessively com- 
plex soups, stews, gravies, puddings and cakes; 
that impure, stale and artificially derived fat 
called butter; milk after the weaning period; 
also things that are not foods at all, as spices, 
tea, coffee, alcoholic beverages and tobacco. So 
far as the ingested materials are concerned as 
causes of digestive disorders, we can never blame 
a thing that we wanted because we needed it, 
but we will always be able to fasten the blame on 
things that we wanted simply because we liked 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

them. Most people can without much harm 
make moderate use of most of the things that 
go unnaturally into the mouth or stomach ; they 
can at least endure them, keep well in spite of 
them, or even enjoy them and their effects and 
thus count them as among the blessings bestowed 
upon us. 

By misinterpretation of our natural want of 
sugar as it is naturally available, we erroneously 
choose to take the unnaturally isolated sugar in- 
stead of the natural sweet fruits and find that 
our needs are very well served by the "just as 
good" and more convenient and cheaper article. 
The error is only a slight one so far as it concerns 
people disposed to moderation. Others, however, 
wanting sugar first because they need it, want it 
next because they like it and fall into the habit 
of taking more than enough and oftener than 
necessary and land in trouble as a result of the 
excess. A need want is satisfied by that much 
which fulfils the need, but a like want knows no 
such limit, because, however much is taken, the 
like persists, the want continues and the limit of 
the amount taken is the capacity to take or to 
endure, where the stomach is leniently submissive 
to cramming, otherwise the objection of the 
stomach marks the limit. 

It is hard to tell from the need's point of view 
when one has enough of sugar, but in the case of 

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Messages to Mothers 



the sweet fruits, when the amount taken has ful- 
filled the need, the want ceases and the feeling 
of enough is such that it would be difficult to eat 
more. The mere like of it gets children into the 
habit of using sugar on all possible occasions and 
in all possible ways and the maximum possible 
or permissible amounts. The like bad practice 
would be impossible with sweet fruits. Sugar is 
likely to be used twenty-one times a week; sweet 
fruits are not likely to be used more than seven 
times a week, and generally people get all the 
sugar they need by eating sweet fruits three or 
four times a week. Of sweet fruits people will 
eat only so much as their need want calls for, and 
they are not going to have any like wants in re- 
gard to them. Sugar in the unnatural condition 
of isolated purity, we charge with having an al- 
luring quality which induces us to like it to such 
an extent that we use it far too often and a great 
deal too much from no other motive than that 
we like it. Many are the cases, therefore, in which 
the gastric intelligence has been offended by too 
much of a good thing and will tolerate no more 
of it, unless it be after a more or less prolonged 
interval of abstinence from it. 

I will cite some individual cases and some 
classes of cases from which my views of this 
matter have been derived. 

First — A boy about ten years of age was so 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

regularly naughty, disobedient and defiant, as to 
be a source of much trouble to his mother and 
the other children of the family, all for no ap- 
parent reason. There was nothing suggestive of 
physical ailment about the boy, and from a 
knowledge of his parents it was concluded that 
his meanness was not hereditary, so we determined 
to suspe6l some fault among the things that en- 
tered his stomach, and began a search in that 
line. Not at first, but in its turn, sugar from the 
bowl was eliminated, and thereafter Jack was a 
good boy. He was allowed then to have and to 
eat sweet fruits without stint. Naming the in- 
sanity of this boy with reference to its cause, 
what else can we call it but a digestive disorder? 
His gastric intelligence did not agree on the 
choice of sugar in the unnatural form of isolated 
purity, but it does agree on the sweet fruits. His 
insanity was a result of an erroneous interpreta- 
tion of his want and the consequent selection 
of the wrong object, — the thing he liked and 
wanted instead of the thing he needed and 
wanted. 

Second. — A boy of ten years, whose bladder 
had always automatically let go its content dur- 
ing sleep in spite of threats, penalties, docloring 
and drugging, was allowed free and unrestrained 
access to a big box of dates, and astonished all 
the family by the quantities he ate, which only 

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Messages to Mothers 



showed how urgent was his need of them. But 
he also astonished his parents by ceasing at once 
and for good his bad habit of wetting the bed 
every night. Here was a problem for the physi- 
cian; the stomach was looked to but there was 
no digestive disorder apparent, so there was noth- 
ing to be eliminated. The question then arising 
was, is there anything in the food line that the 
boy needs, wants and is not getting? A raven- 
ous eagerness for sweets was found and at once 
supplied by a box of dates with free access 
thereto and with the result mentioned. Had the 
boy been allowed what was called for by his 
wants, based upon his needs; had the wants been 
interpreted as calling for natural objects, a whole 
lot of trouble and much cruelty would have 
been averted. This boy's trouble was a result of 
what we must call a digestive disorder. We could 
not have found the fault which served as cause, 
except in the digestive department. He suffered 
from a need unsupplied while others suffer from 
a supply not needed. 

Third. — A gentleman told me that when he 
drank coffee at all, it was at noon; that he 
wanted it and liked it, but only occasionally took 
a cup and that it was not worth while taking it 
at all, because it made him " nervous, irritable 
and savage " and involved him in danger of of- 
fending others about the office. He was reminded 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

that his cup of coffee also contained sugar and 
that, after all, the circumstantial evidence was as 
much against the sugar as the coffee. Now he 
takes coffee without sugar and is convinced that 
it never was the coffee but always the sugar that 
did the harm. Supposing this man had been 
taking his coffee with his usual sugar every day 
and that he had been daily " nervous, irritable 
and savage," I should have called him a chronic 
dyspeptic, even if there were no objective signs 
of digestive disorder present. And such a chronic 
dyspeptic, it is plainly evident, can be cured in 
thirty-six hours. But he would have looked with 
suspicion on any one who held out such hope, or 
made such a promise; he would not have em- 
ployed such a person. Sugar in the artificial state 
of isolation is habitually kept in reach, is habit- 
ually misappropriated to supply a need want and 
simultaneously used to supply a like want, and 
for the latter purpose is used far too often, so that 
as a result the gastric intelligence becomes tired 
of it, just as the conscious mind becomes tired of 
and disgusted with things that are repeated too 
often to the ear, however inoffensive the same 
things may have been at first, as, for example, 
whistling, that eternal, infernal, diurnal and noc- 
turnal nuisance and disturbance of the peace. 
Just what happens in these cases in which defect 
of digestion is not clearly made out, I cannot 

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Messages to Mothers 



say, but abnormal irritability is a result. To this 
result, and back of it to sugar, I have no doubt, 
may be traced domestic discords, incompatibili- 
ties, disruptions, divorces, suicides and other trag- 
edies, — a very little unrecognized digestive dis- 
order in the party at fault being at the bottom 
and beginning of his troubles. The art of food 
conglomeration has been much advanced, the 
simple life has been far departed from and the 
number of restrained insane patients has enor- 
mously increased in proportion to population 
during the second half of the nineteenth century. 

Fourth. — A man, aged fifty-three years, had 
by "constant pain and diarrhea" been reduced 
in four and a half months from two hundred 
and ten pounds to one hundred and fifty pounds 
and seemed destined to die before many days 
longer. Sugar was eliminated from his diet and 
he rapidly recovered and lived with good health 
to the age of seventy-one. 

Fifth. — The commonest result of sugar, when 
the stomach does not agree on its ingestion, is 
the inflation of the stomach with a tasteless and 
odorless gas which proceeds from fermenting 
material in the stomach and causes some distress 
by its bulk but does not make the patient quite 
ill. 

Sixth. — There occur still other cases in which 
sugar causes actual painful illness, the description 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

of which would hardly be successful, as it should 
be felt or at least seen to be appreciated. 

Here, then, are four very different effects of 
sugar when the stomach does not agree on its in- 
gestion. The physician, who says there are many 
kinds of dyspepsia, can make out four kinds right 
here, if he still insists on classifying according 
to phenomena as seen by the dodtor and as felt 
by the patient; but it is much more convenient, 
as soon as we find the cause in the case, to classify 
with reference to the cause, and designate the 
ills mentioned as only one kind of dyspepsia for 
the reason that the causes were identical in all. 

After citing the foregoing very simple exam- 
ples of digestive disorder, I would not like to 
pass on without stating that the whole great 
subject of digestive disorders, with its curious 
train of resulting ills, is as simple as the exam- 
ples cited. We may then dispense with all the 
great mass of attention — study, work, drugs, big 
books, apparatus and operations, all which have 
proved much worse than useless, — and look for 
causes, all of which are as easy to find and to re- 
move as in the sugar cases cited. Remove such 
causes and the subconscious mind does all the 
rest so well, so completely and so promptly as to 
astonish the observer and suggest talk of the 
miraculous. To devote any effort to the treatment 
of digestive disorders is just like treating the 

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Messages to Mothers 



results of leaks in the roof. No amount of treat- 
ment will cure the results in either case, but if 
the leaks be mended the results will cease to ap- 
pear. 

Candies, being less regularly used than sugar, 
would seem to be doing less harm in the aggre- 
gate, but comparing candy and sugar results in 
individual cases, the candy would seem to be the 
worse of the two. Candies, especially fancy can- 
dies, are very much artificial, and in proportion 
to the artificial character of a thing put into the 
stomach is its capacity for harm. 

Results of candy eating are as various and as 
curious as those of sugar. In two healthy small 
children of the same family, the same supply of 
French-mixed candy during the same period of 
time produced in one a skin disease called " pso- 
riasis"; in the other the result was irritability, 
ill temper, and defiant disobedience. The evils 
alluded to do not generally appear as results of 
using sugar or candy now and then, but in cases 
of continued and somewhat prolonged repetition 
they are very likely to occur. Often there is 
much and prolonged suffering before the cause 
is found out. 

The like want of the unnatural, combined 
with the need want of the natural, is so domi- 
nant as to compel the patient to continue the 
use of the mistaken objects until he becomes 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

aware of his misinterpretation of his own nature's 
demand, and corrects it by abstaining from the 
unnatural and resorting to the natural — the sweet 
fruits for the sugar that the need want calls for; 
or the penalty of suffering is so great as to force 
him to quit the unnatural and do without the 
natural object of his need because he does not 
think of it; in which case he must remain far 
from well. A very interesting series of cases 
could be cited showing very troublesome and 
distressing ills of body and mind in persons who 
were not getting their needed sugar, all which 
subsided when they were by instruction and 
direction induced to resort to sweet fruits. 

It is easy enough to see and understand that 
sugars, as well as starches and fats, are provided 
by Nature, not in isolated states of purity, but 
in combination or association with other details, 
and it is as great Nature presents them that the 
small nature of the animal needs and wants 
them. "I thoroughly agree," said Professor E. 
W. Hilgard of the University of California, 
" that the appetite for sweets should, whenever 
possible, be satisfied, not with candy, but with 
fruits like prunes and raisins." 

Sugars, starches and fats are fuel foods; they 
are ordinarily the sources of all the forms of 
energy or power that we display, whether it be 
in work of muscle or brain. But sugar is still 

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Messages to Mothers 



more than a mere item of fuel; there is a most 
important additional necessity for its constant 
even if not daily use. The liver needs sugar; 
the liver makes the bile; the intestine needs the 
bile for digestion of fats and for disinfection of 
the bowel's content. When the liver does not 
get sufficient sugar, there will not be enough 
bile, which fa6l can be ascertained by a glance at 
the material from the bowel, which will be light 
brown or yellow, whereas that color in all but in- 
fants should be brown or dark brown. Without 
sugar enough there will not be bile enough and 
the fats will not be economically used up and 
putrefaction will proceed too far and an excess of 
gas with an unusually bad odor will be present 
in the bowel. Constipation also generally accom- 
panies this state of affairs, which again in turn 
serves as cause for still other ills. This is a con- 
dition actually existing in thousands of men, 
women and children. Many of these cases are 
especially distinguished by irregularly periodical 
headaches. 

A great many sufferers with their sick head- 
aches, their constipations and their variety of 
morbid nervous phenomena, are not satisfying 
their longings in accordance with their own in- 
terpretation of them; for they have learned by 
painful experience that the stomach does not 
agree on their selections. The very things which 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

they believe they so much long for make them 
sick. The stomach can digest them now as well 
as formerly and as well as other stomachs can, 
but it refuses uncompromisingly to do so. The 
nature of the animal will be found to be always 
consistent; it is not true that candies and such 
like are demanded by it, else the stomach would 
not refuse them; the conscious mind in these 
cases misinterprets the demand. Instead of the 
artificial conglomerates that claim the attention 
of the sufferer, put before him sweet fruits and 
it will soon be acknowledged that these are just 
what was needed. So promptly does a good and 
happy result follow that it may be said that these 
fruits constitute the specific remedy in the case, 
and so they do. 

There are many who have been suffering the 
indescribable agonies of sick headaches since 
childhood, as long as forty years. The medical 
profession does not cure them. Here is the one 
specific remedy, the enduring cure : keep sweet 
fruits in sight and in reach; guided by feeling 
only, let the patient eat of them all he wants and 
as often as he wants them; later on let him be 
careful not to eat of them unless he wants them. 
He will not want them every day, but he will 
need and want them every week in the year. 

Give children all the sweet fruits they want 
and it will alarm many a parent to see the quan- 

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Messages to Mothers 



tities they will at first consume; but this only- 
shows how urgently these children have been 
needing such fruits. They will eat much smaller 
quantities each succeeding day, and in two weeks 
they will need and want sweet fruits not more 
than a few times a week; but by all means let 
them have all they want each day. Of course, we 
all desire to achieve the best possible physical 
and mental development for our children; we 
wish to encourage good work and good conduct. 
Satisfy their actual needs and children will as a 
rule be well and surprisingly good. Sweet fruits 
can make great changes for the better in the 
matter of the health and happiness of a great 
many homes. Sugar in the form of sweet fruits 
is simply indispensable; the universal clamoring 
for candy and its enormous and eager consump- 
tion prove this. Any one can readily satisfy him- 
self on this point by giving children all the 
sweet fruits they want and noting the improve- 
ment in them physically, mentally and morally. 
Let sufficient sweet fruit be supplied and there 
is an end to the temptation to eat the artificially 
conglomerated sweets. 

In thousands of children, youths and adults, 
apparently able-bodied, going about their busi- 
ness, we can find in the tongue, skin, stomach 
and bowel, evidences of ill health, of defective 
maintenance, and, worst of all, mental ineffi- 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

ciency bears witness to the fa6l that their brains 
share in the general disorder. Faults of com- 
plexion, paleness of lips, blackheads, hangnails, 
early decay of teeth, arrest of development, 
epilepsy and so on, in learned and well-to-do 
families, certainly lead to the suspicion that there 
is much ill feeding, if not under feeding. 

The supply of dried sweet fruits in variety for 
the family at the minimum rate of fifty pounds 
per year per individual would not involve an 
extra expense. A small outlay is simply made 
for the right and natural materials instead of a 
greater outlay for the wrong and unnatural 
ones, not to mention further and sometimes enor- 
mously greater outlays incidental to the evil 
results of using the wrong materials. Let those 
who are looking for a tonic try sweet fruits for 
the restoration of vigor and cheerful temper. 
When there is occasion to suspe6l the liver, sweet 
fruits may well be resorted to ; the liver will 
then get the sugar it needs. I have met very 
sensible people who finished complicated meals 
with the feeling that there was yet something 
they wanted, a feeling that they could distin- 
guish in themselves any time of day during a 
period of years. The health in such cases is not 
right ; there are many people in that condition. 
They want, because they need, sweet fruits ; it 
is news to them to be so informed. They should 

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Messages to Mothers 



keep sweet fruits in reach and eat what and 
when they want of them. They will find them- 
selves better satisfied thenceforth with meals 
much less complicated, and they will feel better, 
happier, and will work more efficiently. 

To eat nothing and starve to death is a simple 
matter, but to be deprived of some one essential 
and suffer partial starvation, with an inevitable 
string of ills and a fairly good prospect of a very 
slow death, is not so simple. Any discussion of 
the subject would simply result in the conclusion 
that we must, for the sake of health of body and 
mind, have everything we really need and want 
to eat and all we need and want of it and as 
often as we need and want it. Nothing in Nature 
is more plainly indicated than the fact that we 
all want sugar in natural combination as sup- 
plied by the sweet fruits. 

There are four kinds of sweet fruits conspicu- 
ously present and available for selection and still 
others not so sweet are available. They are not 
fresh and it is not practicable to have them so, 
especially in cities, but they are in a perfectly 
good and natural state of preservation and are 
thus available and adapted for use to supply our 
persistent needs the year round. 

These four are dates, figs, raisins and prunes. 
The best of these for the individual is that one 
which his feeling moves him to prefer, and to 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

prefer most frequently during the greatest length 
of time. Briefly, that which is most " repeatable " 
is the best. One's best is not always another's 
best; so each one must mind his own business in 
this matter of selection of sweet fruits, because 
it is not always practicable to follow the example 
of another. The individual differences of choice 
are exceptional, but are numerous enough and 
important enough to command respect and to 
serve as cause of trouble when disregarded. It 
still remains true, however, that there is in 
general a best sweet fruit. 

Dates, two varieties, are by far the most " re- 
peatable " of all the sweet fruits. Generally peo- 
ple easily and soon get tired of figs, prunes and 
raisins, but the date bears repetition longest and 
it is a rare exception that one gets tired of it. 
Dates are "repeatable" more times daily and a 
greater number of consecutive days than any 
other sweet fruit that comes in our way. Of 
course, dates can be dispensed with by us in 
America, but not without some hardship regard- 
less of any comparison as to costs. We could get 
along with figs, raisins and prunes, and Califor- 
nia might produce the greater part of the four 
billions of pounds which would be only the 
actual minimum annual need of the United 
States. In private practice and in public, so far 
as this writing may go, we must adhere to our 

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Messages to Mothers 



preference for dates; because they are the best 
sweet fruit, because they are a great deal cheaper 
than figs and raisins, and, while no dearer than 
prunes generally, the date is very much superior 
and therefore so much the cheaper even at the 
same price. 

The retail prices for dates are generally eight 
and one-third and twelve and one-half cents per 
pound, for the two varieties respectively. Of 
raisins, the producer complains of receiving too 
little to pay the costs of production, and the re- 
tail price for good raisins right here in Califor- 
nia — twenty to twenty-five cents per pound — is 
so high that the great masses of consumers resort 
to raisins only as a luxury and as rarely as the 
occurrence of Christmas. We shall be producing 
dates after a while in the natural and artificial 
oases of our own deserts, and fig, raisin and prune 
production will become so adjusted that the pro- 
ducer can produce and the consumer can con- 
sume on terms satisfactory to both. The State of 
California has the qualifications and can develop 
the capacity to supply the four billions of pounds 
of dry, assorted sweet fruits annually that the 
people of the United States so urgently need, 
instead of the overdone sugar in its artificial 
state of isolation and the still more artificial and 
adulterated conglomerations known as confec- 
tions. 

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Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

Figs, however good, are generally the least 
" repeatable " of the sweet fruits ; a few pounds 
at a time for the family at intervals of some 
weeks are enough. They are not used so much 
as that, for the reason that the imported figs 
cost more than twice as much as dates, and the 
California product, judging it by the share that 
is left for home consumption, is not uniformly 
good, or not uniformly well preserved. There is 
too often a questionable package, or a question- 
able fig in a package, that is likely to give rise 
to a dislike and a suspicion of figs in general. 
There is room for improvement, and it will 
doubtless take place. 

Generally the retail price of prunes is hardly 
to be complained of, except that the producer 
has been getting a ruinously small share of it, 
and we assume that good raisins will soon be- 
come available at a fair price in comparison with 
dates. The supply of dates is not sufficient for 
American needs ; a greater demand for dates 
would raise the price, while a greater demand 
for raisins and prunes would stimulate and in- 
crease production to an extent that would make 
them cheaper than at present. Raisins, prunes 
and figs are destined to be called for in vastly 
greater quantities from year to year in the im- 
mediate future. They serve the sweet-fruit pur- 
poses and can be produced in this State to such 

135 



Messages to Mothers 



an extent and at such cost to the consumer as to 
determine upon their selection to supply the 
greater share of the demand. 

A false alarm about seeds is an excuse some 
people have for not eating raisins. The alarm is 
false indeed. It has grown out of suspicion that 
has no foundation in experience. The grinding 
of seeds is good exercise for the teeth and jaws; 
children do not object to seeds; they will have 
better and more enduring teeth for having used 
them more severely. It is also good and natural 
to have coarse materials moving along through 
the bowel. It is reasonable to suppose that ex- 
cessive grinding and cooking, and exclusion of 
the rough constituents of our food materials, 
have left too little for our digestive apparatus to 
do, and have thus contributed to their degenera- 
tion. When even a very young child swallows a 
prune stone, there will be no cause for alarm; 
the stone that will slip into the stomach so easily 
will pass out of the bowel quite as easily. The 
seeds and stones are indigestible, of course, but 
it is never the indigestible material that does 
any harm. It is the materials that spoil, 
the products of fermentative and putrefactive 
changes, that do the harm. The seeds and stones 
will not behave that way. 

To cook prunes, rinse them off with cold 
water; leave them in a saucepan to soak a night 

136 



Sweet Fruits Versus Confections 

or half-day just barely covered with water, then 
let them come slowly up to the boiling heat and 
they are done. Cook only what you can use the 
same day; no regular consumer wants prunes 
two days in succession; prunes are not " repeata- 
ble" to that extent. Never add sugar nor any 
flavoring matters to prunes. Prunes are a Na- 
ture's combination which no cook can improve 
upon. Attempts to improve them will only re- 
sult in a mixture that the stomach may not agree 
to and which at any rate is not so "repeat able" 
as prunes pure and simple. 



137 



Chapter VII 

Some Failures at School 

Why They Occur and How 
They May be Avoided 



THE functions of human power and the 
endurance of human instrumentalities 
concern the mother again in relation 
to school work of her children, and it is 
undoubtedly our duty to use this present oppor- 
tunity to discuss this matter, which in respect of 
vital importance is quite equal to any subject 
that we have gone over. 

From the Journal of the American Medical 
Association, 1906, is quoted as follows: "As the 
end of the school year approached, the newspa- 
pers brought the usual crop of sad stories with 
regard to children on whose developing mental 
faculties the pressure of school work had made 
serious havoc. At the end of May there began to 
be occasional reports of children disappearing 
from their homes, running away from school, 
and otherwise making themselves subjects for 
newspaper comment more than at any season of 
the year. During June the stories of children, 
especially girls, who were noted for acting 
queerly as the result of overwork at school, be- 

138 



Some Failures at School 



came more frequent. Toward the end of the 
month there were a few reported suicides. In 
most of the cases a dire6l connection between 
worry over school work, competition for prizes 
and preparation for examinations could be 
traced." 

This quoted statement defines premises with 
which we have been familiar without under- 
standing, of which we have knowledge but not 
sufficient for transmutation to a6lion; yet there 
is, perhaps, no lesson of vital importance, derived 
from the experience of others before us and 
around us, that we so much need to learn as that 
which is available from the statement quoted. 
The writer quoted makes liberal allowance for 
sensational exaggeration of such accounts by the 
newspapers; but no such allowance need be 
made; exaggerated accounts of the few cases do 
not begin to compensate for the vastly greater 
number of unmentioned instances of slight dam- 
age to children from the same causes, but which 
are not sensational enough for publication. The 
trouble as a whole could hardly be exaggerated. 
For one such case published, I have no doubt 
there are fifty others that would appear of no 
consequence to the general public. The case of 
the little harm, however, differs only in degree 
from the case of irreparable ruin, and to give a 
mere passing glance at the few cases that attain 

139 



Messages to Mothers 



to public notoriety, is not giving heed to the 
signs of a really prevalent and wide-spread dan- 
ger. 

" It seems to be the efrort from primary grade 
to university to crowd the child's brain to the 
utmost, and each year we see wrecks, mental 
and physical, leaving our schools." I would not 
agree, however, that " medical inspectors should 
be a part of our school organizations." Medical 
men are not qualified to avert the evils that we 
are considering, and, when the damage appears, 
the case naturally falls to the care of a physician 
of the family's own choosing. The cases do not 
need to be discovered, they merge into view 
spontaneously. The first signs are observable to 
parents and teachers. I would agree on instruc- 
tion of teachers, normal-school classes, and on 
open discussions in school-board meetings and in 
the public press. The political contingent of the 
medical profession is more than willing to en- 
croach upon the private affairs of the home to 
an extent that would leave us very little to say 
on matters that can never be anything else than 
our own exclusive business. 

We may admit that some of the victims of 
the strain and stress of competitive school work 
are not in robust health, that they are survivors 
of the ills of the weaning period and of the in- 
fant-feeding period, still so much the worse for 

140 



Some Failures at School 



having been sick during those periods and des- 
tined to constitute a large share of the mentally 
and bodily invalid population and also a large 
share of that one-third of the population that is 
of no account ; but I do not believe that these, 
of defective health in the first place, form more 
than a small share of those whose failure at 
school is attended by mental disaster. Of course, 
at the time of the breakdown, the victim's ap- 
pearance is suggestive of ill health, but not sug- 
gestive of the robust health that we know most 
of such children to have enjoyed at the begin- 
ning of the stress and strain — so far as individ- 
ual observation and inquiry can determine. 

A little tot is well, bright and happy, and is 
doing well the little work that is allotted to the 
child of average ability at her age at school. 
The mother's pride in her child then tempts her 
to induce the child to do still more, still better 
and to be busier. If the mother talks much and 
speedily, and continually engages the child in 
talk and thought, so much the worse. Talk and 
thought involve mental effort, use and wear and 
strain of instrumentalities and appropriation of 
power ; all of which can be easily carried on to 
excess, especially in the case of the lone child 
that is mostly denied the more natural, better 
and easier occupation of association and play 
with other children of its own natural selection. 

141 



Messages to Mothers 



And this child is still a mere tot when music 
is imposed on it. Some young music-teacher 
would like to have her for a pupil, thinks she is 
old enough, has others younger than she, and, be- 
sides, the younger she begins the better the 
chances for future excellence in the art. The 
mother believes, allows and encourages both 
teacher and child, and now some half-hours of 
each week are appropriated to instruction and 
practice. An experienced music-teacher tells me 
that she does not take little tots as pupils; they 
do no good, she says. But whether they make 
progress or not, so long as they try, it costs just 
as much power and wear of instrumentalities to 
fail as it does to succeed, and disappointment and 
failure militate against health and happiness 
much more than success, and more so in children 
than in adults. Compulsory study of music, in 
advance of qualification for it, is most likely to 
disgust the child with the undertaking and in- 
sure its failure in that line, even though it might 
at a later age under proper circumstances have 
done very well with music. 

Supposing, however, that a child does for a 
while succeed with music and does work at it 
somewhat willingly, then its school work will 
fail to show good results and it will lose interest 
and pleasure in the same. Even if for some 
months the child succeeds fairly well with both 

142 



Some Failures at School 



the proper school work and the improperly extra 
work of music, it must then certainly follow that 
the child's health will fail. So long as the child 
is cheerful and its mental undertakings are pro- 
gressing fairly well, its digestion must be con- 
sidered fairly good; for when digestion is defec- 
tive, conduct and work become defective as 
results of suffering and diminution of power de- 
rived from foods. Digestion being good and 
overtime work continuing, maintenance must 
become defective. Overtime work is that which 
is in excess of the capacity of the working in- 
strumentalities to endure, or in excess of the 
power present and available for work. If the 
work is in excess of the capacity of the working 
instrument, then so much the worse for the 
instrument — the brain in these cases. If the 
work is in excess of the power available for that 
purpose, then power for work may still be had 
by diverting it from some other uses. Extraor- 
dinary demand for power often causes diver- 
sion of that power which serves the purposes 
of digestion. Digestion then fails more or 
less completely, and overtime work is the 
cause of digestive disorder in such cases. In 
other cases, like the one we are considering, 
digestion remaining normal, the overdraught of 
power is derived from the child's power-storage 
battery, its fat. The child must therefore grow 

143 



Messages to Mothers 



thinner and display signs of defective main- 
tenance. 

The child is supposed to be growing, and 
growth is a process of building and can never 
under any circumstances proceed except at the 
expense of power and plenty of it. But overtime 
work can and does easily divert that power which 
is present and available for growth, and appro- 
priate it, but only to the detriment of necessary 
growth. That is why so often the overworked 
child does not grow as it is expected to. The ar- 
rest of growth and development, by diversion of 
the power for that purpose to overtime work, may 
be temporary and may be compensated for 
by unusually rapid growth at another time. 
Overtime work, by its overdraught on the com- 
mon stock of power, is responsible for the failure 
of another very important function already 
alluded to, the general function of maintenance 
of that normal physical integrity called health. 
In this condition the child appears well and is 
well, with every organ of body and mind in nor- 
mal condition of working efficiency, which is 
not the case when maintenance is defective; for 
then, although the child may eat well, digest 
well and do all the allotted work well, it does 
not appear well, and some special defects may be 
observed to have occured in the condition of its 
teeth, nails and skin and often in its conduct. 

144 



Some Failures at School 



A growing girl under stress and strain of school 
work, plus extras, is very likely to be difficult to 
get along with at home. " We can hardly live in 
the same house with her," is the remark that 
came from a very good mother in such a case. 

A commonly prevalent way of insuring failure 
in music, or other like extra, is to begin the sys- 
tematic study and persistent practice of it at the 
early age of incompetence. If the child does 
nevertheless succeed with the extra, it must fail 
in some other respect. The danger from mental 
strain and stress is greatest in cases of children 
who are the brightest and most willing workers; 
these are the ones that are most likely to be ap- 
plauded and stimulated to do still better. A girl 
is full grown at sixteen, seventeen or eighteen, 
and will then have the qualification to under- 
stand and appreciate, and the power to try for, 
achievement in music, and will succeed all the 
better for having previously made no effort in 
this line excepting that which has been required 
of her in the little rudimentary study of music 
in the public school which has introduced and 
interested her in the subject. The time to begin 
music is when the learner wants to begin and 
continue its study and practice. With many the 
time never comes, and these would do no good 
with the opportunity anyway. 

The public school dispenses a little instruction 

145 



Messages to Mothers 



in music. Even though a child has time for more 
and extra music, it has not the power for more, 
and its mental instrumentalities, its brain, will 
not endure the additional wear and strain of 
more study and practice. In its allotment of 
work, the public school reckons on the pupil 
of average ability, of average strength of instru- 
mentalities and of average power to operate 
these instrumentalities. This allotment should 
always be open to criticism, should be passed on 
by disinterested judges rather than by those who 
have something to teach and want to be em- 
ployed in teaching it. When the allotment of 
school work is about right, it will be easy for 
the strong, hard for the weak, and for the aver- 
age pupil it will be such that he or she does the 
work reasonably well without arrest of develop- 
ment or incurring any defeat of health or con- 
du&. 

According to the public school scheme in Cali- 
fornia, there are eight years to be spent in the 
primary and grammar schools, four years in the 
high school and four years in the university. 
From the age of fourteen to twenty-two — from 
the entrance to the high school to the exit from 
the university — the girl does all the mental 
work that the boy does, and it may be admitted 
that she does it just as well. The girl, how- 
ever, in comparison with the boy at this time of 

146 



Some Failures at School 



life, is a smaller and weaker instrument of labor, 
and must therefore work harder, must endure 
greater strain and stress to keep even with the 
boy. The girl has a smaller digestive apparatus, 
eats less and develops less power and has less 
for working purposes than the boy. In the case 
of the boy after his growth is complete, there are 
no extraordinary functions requiring any share 
of his power, and no other occupation, or affinity, 
or inclination, to divert either power or attention 
from his work. He is not missing nor neglecting 
nor sacrificing anything, and he gets through col- 
lege just as big, strong and as well as he would 
have emerged from eight years' service in any 
other occupation. 

A girl during these eight years has an extra 
function to be maintained and special organs to 
be developed at the expense of much of her 
power. She has a love of home, and, unless she 
makes up her mind to abandon it and with it 
to abandon her natural and only ultimately 
happy sphere, she must cultivate that love of 
home and develop it into a familiarity with all 
the details of its maintenance and love of all its 
contents, associations and environments. The 
prime requisite is character, to be really a gen- 
tleman and really a lady. In the case of the 
lady it is demanded, and she uses much diligence 
to comply with the demand, that she appear her 

147 



Messages to Mothers 



best and dress her best, consistently with good 
judgment which she must possess. She is under 
an eternal obligation to be charming. The eight 
years of strain, stress and anxiety of mental 
work on time and under orders, in the case of 
the average well-prepared girl at this formative 
time of life, may not be at all in excess of what 
her brain as an instrument of labor can endure; 
but the amount of power which the schedule of 
work under domination involves, which must be 
expended for the achievement, is more than is 
naturally appropriated for this extremely artifi- 
cial purpose. The work is done and well done, 
but at what cost ? Power for this artificial pur- 
pose is diverted from natural purposes, which 
therefore fail more or less completely. Among 
the results there is disorder of the girl's peculiar 
function; there is constipation, for even the 
bowel requires power for its operation; there is 
defective digestion, and defective maintenance 
which can be perceived at a glance and tells 
what a sacrifice this higher coeducation costs 
the young woman. 

She has little time and less power to develop 
her natural love of home into any intimacy with 
the details of its maintenance, into any attach- 
ment for its contents, its associations, its environ- 
ments or memories. For eight years the young 
lady hurries to and from school, the grace of 

148 



Some Failures at School 



carriage fails to be acquired, yields to the hurry 
habit; her hair might be done up more neatly; 
there is room for dressing more becomingly and 
in better taste, but there is not time, or, being 
"dead tired," there is no power. The taste for 
personal appearance is so long neglected that it 
is lost never to be regained; or, if there still re- 
mains the desire to appear her best, she has neg- 
lected to acquire the art of materializing that 
laudable desire. Her voice has the capacity for 
development to an extent which alone would 
make her charming; but that also must yield 
to the pursuit of the prescribed work that the 
men do. Finally, she interests but she does not 
inspire; she commands respe6l but not admira- 
tion. Her speech is hurried and her delivery 
lacks grace, elegance and ease, and her neglected 
voice is hopelessly and forever out of tune. We 
are much interested in what she knows and can 
do, but we are not interested in what she is. 

The eight years of almost complete diversion 
of time, attention and effort from home, and a 
few more years in some professional or official 
pursuit, spoil a woman for woman's place in the 
home. Of such a woman it may be foretold that 
she will not be a success as a housekeeper, wife 
or mother; the home of her married life is the 
abode of the ills that I have attempted to ex- 
plain. The misery brought by these ills will 

149 



Messages to Mothers 



more than balance what happiness prevails 
within the walls of such a home. It was, for ex- 
ample, in such a home, abounding in wealth, 
learning and piety, that a son and daughter died 
in infancy and the surviving child was raised 
and educated to the highest possible conventional 
degree of excellence and ill health, and then 
committed suicide. And this is just one real ex- 
ample of many tragedies that are all of a kind, 
differing only in detail and degree. 

The young woman who ventures alongside of 
the young man in the higher coeducational insti- 
tution of learning, does all the work he does, 
settles in his sphere, fails in it and in her own also, 
and is in the end unnatural, unwell, more or less 
helpless and unhappy. The American learned 
wife and mother who continues her pursuit of 
learning incompatibly with her duties at home, 
is a shining bad example, a fallacious ideal, for 
the younger women of doubtful ambition to 
look to. 

The education of women for their natural 
sphere is just as necessary as the education of 
men for their sphere, but the one differs very 
much from the other even if there is much in 
common. Judged by the outcome, a woman in a 
school adapted for men is just as absurd and im- 
practicable as a man would be in a school 
adapted for women. The tree is judged by its 

150 



Some Failures at School 



fruits, the workman by his work, and we may 
judge schools by the people who have emerged 
from them. 

Professor Dr. Emil Reich seems to have studied 
the relations of husband and wife, in regard to 
the affairs of each, in at least several European 
countries. He considers the Englishwoman the 
most beautiful and clever woman in the world. 
Other observers generally agree with him. So 
much for the home, the school and the environ- 
ment in which she grew and was cultivated. 
"Yet with all her charms," says the Professor, 
"she has less influence over men than any other 
whom I know. With beauty to attract and with 
brains to enliven she is only a figurehead in the 
social scheme of British life." 

The Englishwoman is a modest, quiet, shining 
light, emitting powerfully effective rays of in- 
fluence that the utilitarian Professor did not take 
account of and the silent effects of which he 
must have failed to observe. The Englishwoman 
attends diligently and personally to her home 
and children, the effect of which is the influence 
that tends to make her daughters like herself 
and her sons lovers of home and founders of 
homes like home. Only a figurehead? A 
woman's functions are, to be and to do . She may 
not have opportunities for doing much, but there 
is no excuse for a physically beautiful woman 

151 



Messages to Mothers 



being anything less than simply great, and it is 
by virtue of this that she is what the Professor 
concedes, and she certainly emits an influence 
proportional to what she is, not proportional to 
what she does. 

" And worst of all," continues the Professor, 
"she does not demand to share her husband's 
work." The Englishwoman has quite enough to 
do in the sphere of her home, first with her 
mother, then in the home of her own. Even if 
she has time to share her husband's work, she 
has not the proper instrumentalities and has not 
the power. She has not the qualifications for 
men's work; she had not the capacity for acquir- 
ing such qualifications; she is not built for or 
adapted to men's work. Had such qualification 
been attempted, it would have been at the sacri- 
fice of all that makes her charming and with the 
certainty of failure in both the husband's sphere 
and in her own. The Englishwoman minds her 
own business, — that alone is an item in her list 
of charms. In her own business she does wonder- 
fully well, she would only lose by trying to do 
more. 

A great many commercially inclined people 
agree with the Professor that "a woman's duty 
does not begin and end in being a good house- 
wife and a faithful mother." A great many peo- 
ple will also agree that, when she gets into the 

152 



Some Failures at School 



position of wife and mother, her duties certainly 
do end in that sphere — the only natural, the fit- 
test, the happiest, the most fruitful, the most 
efficiently influential to the widest extent and 
greatest length of time. 

In the English home, the English Church and 
in the English young ladies' school, by processes 
of cultivation as well as education, by the natu- 
ral, agreeable and alluring method of example 
more than by the artificial method of precept, 
without strain or stress or hurry or any danger 
of sacrifice of health, the Englishwoman acquires 
that excellence of manners, voice, diction ; that 
exquisite grace of carriage, movement and 
speech; that simple artistic taste in dress and 
adornment, and that little learning, that consti- 
tute her " the most beautiful and clever woman 
in the world." But the Professor, who sees this 
intrinsic merit and is evidently inspired by it 
and is so far influenced as to publish this state- 
ment to the world, fails to see that such women 
must inspire their husbands, their children, the 
community and the nation and the world, for 
the Englishwoman is the wonder of the world of 
women. 

And yet the English girl, considered as raw 
material, is not pretty at all; the marvelous ef- 
fect is all achieved by a well-adapted system of 
education and cultivation compatible with the 

153 



Messages to Mothers 



nature of woman, her health and her sphere. 
The Englishwoman, after all, is not our chief 
concern; I only mean to suggest inspection of 
the means by which she achieves her excellence 
and retains her health. 

The published obituary does not generally state 
that a premature death was due to strain and 
stress of mental effort, nor does the death certi- 
ficate mention such primary cause; but one can 
see from such accounts that the mental effort of 
the child's occupation was unnatural and exces- 
sive and must have reduced it to a condition in 
which it became an easy non-resisting prey to 
disease. A boy fourteen years of age dies, and is 
referred to as having been " an unusually bright 
boy." But it must have cost the boy a tremen- 
dous amount of premature effort to become so 
bright. 

In the obituary of a girl eleven years of age, I 
read as follows : " Although young in years, the 
little girl was one of the brightest pupils in her 
class in school. She was an accomplished musi- 
cian and displayed unusual oratorical ability. 
Her ability as a musician gained her a host of 
admiring friends, both in Berkeley and in Oak- 
land, where she had given numerous recitals." 
Accomplished musician, unusual oratorical abil- 
ity, had given numerous recitals, eleven years of 
age and doing the regular allotment of school 

154 



Some Failures at School 



work to the highest degree of efficiency, therein 
lay the primary cause of death, and it matters 
little what may have been the last straw or the 
immediate cause. The human brain at eleven 
years of age cannot endure so much work, and 
the human digestive apparatus at eleven years 
of age does not develop power enough to do the 
work involved in so much achievement of such 
excellence. 

It was announced that the children of a kin- 
dergarten would give an exhibition of their work 
and how it was performed, that the entertainment 
would include several instrumental and vocal 
selections, and would begin at half past seven in 
the evening, and that following the exercises 
light refreshments would be served, — evidently 
a long program, to end at a late hour for chil- 
dren so young. How much the showing and ex- 
plaining of the work and of the instrumental 
and vocal selections the little children of five 
and six years of age were to do, I do not know, 
but to be called on for anything of the kind in 
this formal public manner at a time of day when 
they should naturally and necessarily be going 
to bed, is subjecting their delicate mental instru- 
ments very prematurely to unnatural tension 
and strain and at the time of day when children 
are tired. And if the children were to remain 
to the end of the show, including the light 

155 



Messages to Mothers 



refreshments, they must have been kept up to a 
very late hour, considering their ages, and they 
must have taken their light refreshments at a 
time when they were most exhausted and could 
hardly be expected to have power to digest said 
refreshments, which would then lie in their 
stomachs, spoil more or less and serve as cause 
for a restless night. 

These little children and their achievements 
and their newest clothes were on exhibition. 
They performed and did their best, with all their 
might, under the disadvantage of the lime-light 
situation. At the fag-end of the day they were 
tired by the day's ordinary doings; they were 
then made overtired by the preparations for the 
evening; then at a point worse than the fag-end 
of the day, in the night, with power exhausted, 
the reserve of the storage battery already drawn 
upon under the spurs of the lime-light stimula- 
tion, they now, late at night, stimulated by in- 
sistence and the extraordinary character of the 
refreshments, take into their stomachs a con- 
glomerate mess, more or less artificial, for the 
digestion of which there is now no power re- 
maining and now no stimulus to make the stor- 
age battery of fat yield power to digest this 
unnatural and untimely mess. Not even the 
sterilizing gastric juice is supplied; even that 
little detail cannot be performed without power. 

156 



Some Failures at School 



So the mess lies unsterilized in the stomach, free 
to ferment; and whatever microbian life may- 
have lodged on these refreshments, from the 
second-hand air of the crowd, is free not only to 
multiply itself by two every twenty minutes, 
but is also free to pass on into the intestine, still 
increasing, and from there invade and colonize 
many parts and almost any part of the body. 

The stomach is a comparatively safe place into 
which to receive microbian life regardless of the 
variety, so long as there is a normal supply of 
gastric juice to make its destruction sure. But 
gastric juice is not produced by perpetual motion; 
it requires real power to produce it, and there- 
fore all one's might should not be appropriated 
for other purposes all the time, else there is 
no power for gastric juice nor for digestion. The 
power of resistance to disease must often mean 
the power to supply gastric juice. For this un- 
natural and perilous usage of children both 
teacher and parents are to blame, but the child 
suffers the penalty. There are days enough and 
long enough for all such public exhibitions and 
juvenile try outs, and the resort to night times is 
not necessary. Parents, of course, mean well, are 
consciously guilty of no greater sin, perhaps, 
than pride in their children's progress and 
achievements, which is no sin at all until it is al- 
lowed to materialize so far as to endanger the 

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Messages to Mothers 



child's health. When death ensues, some disease 
is mentioned as having been the cause, but no 
mention is made of the cause which so far 
wrecked the child, brain and body, as to leave it 
an easy prey to the illness which served as the 
immediate cause of death. 

"Little eight-year-old Gladys Bennett, who 
was called the child prima donna, and who was 
an infant prodigy from the days of her baby- 
hood, will no more thrill applausive audiences 
with her renderings of music by the world's 
greatest composers, with voice and violin." 
"While other children less nervous, less sensi- 
tive, than frail little Gladys Bennett, were play- 
ing in the fresh air and invigorating sunshine, 
she, cloistered within doors, was striving to draw 
from the strings of her violin strains of music 
which would have taxed the strength of an ex- 
perienced and hardened virtuoso." These two 
paragraphs I have copied from the San Francisco 
Examiner, September 8, 1905. The original 
consisted of more than a column, large display 
headings and a picture. Each generation of 
mothers has about the same lessons to learn. 
Here was an opportunity to learn a very useful 
lesson from the very sad example and experience 
of another. One such example, one such lesson 
in display type and a picture, is certainly enough 
to serve the purpose of instruction. But instruc- 

158 



Some Failures at School 



tion without repetition of instruction generally 
fails to make an impression. So even if their 
mothers do remember the case of Gladys Ben- 
nett, the coming infant musical and otherwise 
favored prodigies will still continue to be in 
danger of the unnatural, extraordinary and pro- 
longed mental strains that their mothers are yet 
likely to urge upon them while yet in their ten- 
derest years. 

The newspaper accounts of the disastrous mis- 
takes of some people serve the extremely useful 
purpose of warning to other people who are in 
danger of making like mistakes; that is, if the 
real moral of the example is perceived, or the 
true conclusion of the account is understood, 
Unfortunately, the real merit of the example 
and the account is concealed more or less com- 
pletely by the alleged immediate cause of death. 
The immediate cause is required in the certificate 
of death, and this is what the public takes cog- 
nizance of. The public will generally overlook 
the real primary cause of death; it will gener- 
ally fail to see that the overtime work, the ex- 
cessive strain of over-stimulated effort at an un- 
natural occupation, at an untimely season of life, 
at an immature and incompetent age, so nearly 
killed the subject that she falls an easy prey to 
the illness which served as the last straw. Such 
last straw is not always necessary; overtime work 

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alone has killed and half-killed, paralyzed, many 
adults that I know of even in my small field of 
observation. In the examples mentioned, our 
evil subject assumed gigantic proportions and 
did its extremely cruel worst. For one such ex- 
treme case of premature, prolonged and fast driv- 
ing of children, there are fifty others in which 
the harm done appears so slight that the real evil 
is hardly recognized at all; it is almost always 
occluded by a digestive or " nervous " disorder 
that appears as a first result of the evil we are 
considering. Treatment is erroneously and fruit- 
lessly directed to this result, this digestive disor- 
der, constipation, irritability, epilepsy and so on. 
Bright, speedy and ambitious children with am- 
bitious parents are most in peril. 

The dull, slow, stubborn child is safe; the sub- 
conscious mind in his case insists on minding its 
own business. Feeling governs in his case, and 
the child is simply loyal to his own inerrant 
nature. So persistently true to himself is he that 
he will not yield to any attempt to make him 
work at a speed which exceeds his adaptation, or 
to an extent which exceeds his available power, 
or which exceeds the capacity of his instrumen- 
talities to endure. Nature in him will attend to 
the child first, its digestion, its maintenance, its 
growth and development; after these are pro- 
vided for, the child will do what is required to 

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Some Failures at School 



the extent of power present and available. Such 
a boy or girl may not be regarded as a " promis- 
ing" one, but, given only the conditions for good 
health, he or she is most likely to be a most use- 
ful member of the community when the work- 
ing time of life has come. 

While the pursuit of learning at school has 
grown to be comparatively easy, nevertheless 
the amount of work allotted and adapted to the 
average learner of average ability is such as to 
require, if well done, about all the strain that his 
brain can safely endure and about all the power 
that he can appropriate to such purpose. Any 
additional work, therefore, of mind or muscle, 
is overwork or overtime work. There are many 
inconspicuous but commonly observed cases of 
failure at school under favorable conditions of 
good health and care. In such cases it will be 
found that the child's power is diverted to, and 
its brain is being used for, other purposes in ad- 
dition to its school work. A boy fails to hold his 
place with his class, and it is found that in accord- 
ance with his parents' will, and somewhat against 
his own, he is taking violin lessons and spending 
much time and power in practice while other 
boys are out playing or doing nothing but just 
resting from school work, and growing. 

Another boy is found to be prematurely shar- 
ing the white man's burden of disseminating 

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Messages to Mothers 



intelligence by distributing newspapers: a good 
scheme for an old enough boy in the case of an 
evening paper; but in the case of a morning 
paper, the boy's very necessary sleep is reduced 
an hour or two, which in a year amounts to a 
sufficient shortage to account for some arrest of 
development. He must entertain some nightly 
anxiety in regard to the certainty of early ris- 
ing, and is therefore already nursing the anxiety 
habit. He hurries off to the base of supplies at 
twice the speed and four times the power of his 
normal rate of movement. He is expected to 
hurry until the last of his customers has been 
served, and he is thus early initiated into the 
hurry habit. If he had breakfast before start- 
ing, it was too early for an appetite, and after 
eating, when much power was required for diges- 
tion, he drew upon his power to the maximum 
possible extent in making his hurried rounds. 
If he did not eat before starting, he now hurries 
home, arriving rather late for finding the family 
breakfast at its best, and by nine o'clock he takes 
his seat in school a little tired and sleepy and is 
not going to do his work as well and as cheer- 
fully as if that work were his exclusive business. 
Now he is by the circumstances of the case forced 
into the bad habit of being content with work 
that is short of being well done. 

The school work is already so much that if 

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Some Failures at School 



well done, there remains scant enough power for 
growth and the minimum recreation necessary 
to growth and the happy disposition he has and 
will need through life. To get along poorly at 
school takes the pleasure out of the boy's school- 
going occupation and serves as the first step 
toward quitting school in favor of some wage- 
earning occupation. This is no misfortune, for 
in connection with an occupation, or simultane- 
ously with the pursuit of it, he can acquire learn- 
ing and experience that will constitute a good 
education. With health, integrity, ability and 
industry, a boy will prosper beyond all reason- 
able expectation, whether he go through college 
or not. The boy who goes through school and 
college overworked and underfed and with all 
possible self-denial generally, will be physically 
and mentally tired in the end, and will at best 
only drift into a position of mediocrity with 
small chances for promotion. 

Girls are less capable of enduring extra mental 
work than boys. Nature has imposed upon girls 
a function which is so exhaustive of power as to 
leave them not enough to compete with boys 
during the high-school age. If the girl insists 
on doing the allotted work of the high school 
and of the college for boys, she can do it, but it 
seems that the performance is likely to determine 
her future sterility. The reason seems to be that 

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Messages to Mothers 



the power which was naturally provided, was 
present and available for development of the re- 
productive organs, was diverted during the eight 
years of this educational undertaking to the 
strenuous mental work thereof. This undertak- 
ing by the average girl requires so nearly all 
her might, so nearly all her power, as to leave 
too little power for the completion of her devel- 
opment. She is likely to fail in her function of 
reproduction, because her organs of reproduction 
are defective in development and therefore in- 
competent. 

Study must be rated as purely original mental 
work, and, as already explained, an hour of such 
work costs as much power as two and a halt 
hours of hard manual labor. Three hours a day, 
five days a week, actually applied to study, 
would tax the public high-school pupil quite 
enough, and four hours a day for state-college 
study, seems to me, would be the average safe 
maximum limit. Study in excess is overtime 
work. All night work in addition to day work is 
overtime work. The day is long enough, night 
work is unnatural. Those who work at night are 
less efficient in the day and are as a rule poor 
sleepers, oversensitive, irritable and dyspeptic; 
the net results show that it does not pay in the 
case of man, woman or child. Everybody knows 
it does not pay in the case of the domestic animal. 

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APR 31 1908 



